Real Questions Quotes

The real questions refuse to be placated. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.

The real question is, can you love the real me? Not the perfect person you want me to be, not that image you had of me, but who I really am.

I have no idea where I'm going but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

People have enough ideas. The real question is "Which ideas are you going to use?".

With MOOCs, “the real question becomes, where is human intervention important?

The real question is not are there other forms of life in the universe, but are there other intelligent forms of life out there right now. Because the universe is not only really big but it's also really long. It's been around for a long time; it's going to be around for a long time.

[James] Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he's going to be the president of.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Let's start with Jesus' answer: "Look for the kingdom first and all else will come together." Life is fragmenting, fragmented. I have a thousands things to do, others do too. We can live our life as if the main question is, "How can keep it together? How do I juggle all the balls? But the real question is, "How can I stay home - interiorly home - while I do these many things?

What happens to us in life is less important; the real question can be whether or not we use the experience to grow.

The real question is not what's wrong with Trump, what's up with Trump, but what's up with the establishment.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

"Do you have the talent?" is rarely the question. "Do you have the guts to finish?" is the real question.

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

I think Americas food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, its very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.

The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

The real question, after all, is not the quantity of life, but its quality, its depth, its purity, its fortitude, its fineness of spirit and gesture of soul.

Do you want to know what you are? You are a creator. At every moment you are creating. The real question is, what are you creating?

"Katniss?" He drops my hand and I take a step, as if to catch my balance. "It was all for the Games," Peeta says. "How you acted." "Not all of it," I say, tightly holding onto my flowers. "Then how much? No, forget that. I guess the real question is what's going to be left when we get home?" he says. "I don't know. The closer we get to District Twelve, the more confused I get," I say. He waits, for further explanation, but none's forthcoming. "Well, let me know when you work it out," he says, and the pain in his voice is palpable.

Gore Vidal said "Nixon is us, we are Nixon." I think we have to acknowledge that combination of idealism and sleaze; we want to be better than we are, and we sometimes don't face up to the real questions.

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

The real question is, until [Hillary Clinton] faces that legacy and admits that what her husband did was absolutely in the interest of a white supremacist nation, to put it bluntly, I just don't trust her.

A wedding was a strange ceremony, she thought, with all those formal words, those solemn vows made by one to another; whereas the real question that should be put to the two people involved was a very simple one. Are you happy with each other? was the only question that should be asked; to which they both should reply, preferably in unison, Yes.

All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture. The only real question is: whose interpretation? People with differing interpretations of Scripture cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve their differences. In order for the Scripture to function as an authority, it must be read and interpreted by someone. According to "solo" Scriptura, that someone is each individual, so ultimately, there are as many final authorities as there are human interpreters.

The IRS says it wants to make sure companies can give their employees a choice between a new cash balance plan and the traditional defined benefit plan. The real question here is whether companies should be required to give their workers that choice.

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Even Boris Johnson doesn't think there's going to be a United States of Europe. ​And I think there's a real question here that you're being asked to make a decision that's irreversible we cant change it, we wake up on Friday and we don't like it, and we're being sold it on a lie because they lied about the cost of Europe, they lied about Turkey's entrance to Europe, they lied about the European army because we've got a veto for that they put that in their leaflets and they've lied about this here tonight too and its not good enough you deserve the truth you deserve the truth.

The question shouldn't be “Why are you, a Christian, here in a death camp, condemned for trying to save Jews?' The real question is “Why aren't all the Christians here?

We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world - a monster country, one might say, along with others such as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether "bigness" in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.

The real question is why are millions of people so unhappy, so bored, so unfulfilled, that they are willing to drink, snort, inject or inhale any substance that might blot out reality and give them a bit of temporary relief.

God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: Where is the salt?

If you had a system that could read all the pages and understand the context, instead of just throwing back 26 million pages to answer your query, it could actually answer the question. You could ask a real question and get an answer as if you were talking to a person who read all those millions and billions of pages, understood them, and synthesized all that information.

It's easy to say that entrepreneurs will create jobs and big companies will create unemployment, but this is simplistic. The real question is who will innovate.

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.

The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.

To discover your real questions, simply take a time-out. Stop looking ahead of yourself at where you’re going or backward at where you’ve been. When you do stop, there’s a sense of going nowhere. There’s a sense of gap, which is a tremendous relief. You can simply breathe and be who you are.

Barack Obama is a threat to the continued existence of the United States, and he must be impeached, or resign. The real question is, what will we replace his bad policies with? Real patriots understand the need to think ahead, to create a meaningful purpose and direction as we rebuild our nation. We know that the next several generations need a better world to live in, which can only be a Post-Obama World.

The real question today is not when human life begins, but, what is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law - the same right we have.

We scientists can argue forever about important topics like slightly different flavors of vanilla ice cream. Consider the silliness of this debate: one group of scientists found a 90% decline of big fish and criticized fishery management. Some other scientists found an 80% decline and started a big argument with the 90% people. Who cares if it's 80% or 90%? The real question is whether it's OK to let fishermen take most of the big fish out of our oceans.

The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love?' These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will be many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.

You still think I've gone cracked in the head," Ben said, amused. "Listen, if tomorrow we pulled into Biren and someone told you there were shamble-men in the woods, would you believe them?" My father shook his head. "What if two people told you?" Another shake. Ben leaned forward on his stump. "What if a dozen people told you, with perfect earnestness, that shamble-men were out in the fields, eating-" "Of course I wouldn't believe them," my father said, irritated. "It's ridiculous." "Of course it is," Ben agreed, raising a finger. "But the real question is this: Would you go into the woods?

The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

There's this idea that artists are free and that means that we can do whatever we want to do. And it's very important to engage with this idea, just as human beings, that we are free to do what we wanna do. So the real question becomes, then, what do we wanna do? And as one gets to know oneself, one finds that there are things that return again and again that you wanna do.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

We know what you want to accomplish... The real question is, 'what are you willing to push through the dip for?' What are you willing to stand up for, bleed for, commit to and generally be unreasonable about? Because that's what's going to actually get done.

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity—and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

The real question is how do you stay funny in your 70s and 80s? And that's a real accomplishment, you know, the longevity.