Search for Understanding Quotes

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

I kind of feel, in a way, all of us will forever be asking those questions of ourselves: Who am I and how do I fit in in the world and what is all this about? Because those aren't really... there are no answers to those questions, in a sense.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.

I think that life has a secret, and children they hold that secret. Maybe it's not given to everybody to discover this thing.

There's only one reason we live. It's very simple. To find the creator. That's just my understanding.

I am generally fascinated by what are the big, challenging questions - that's behind my curiosity.

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.

The research is the most interesting part… That’s how I work. I go some place and I walk it and I talk to people until I find what I’ve come for. Or not. Fortunately, I tend to find what I’m after.

I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.

We come. We go. And in between we try to understand.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

It is wisdom that is seeking for wisdom.

Once He created the Big Bang... He could have envisioned it going in billions of directions as it evolved, including billions of life-forms and billions of kinds of intelligent beings. As a theologian, I would say that the proposed search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is also a search of knowing and understanding God through his works - especially those works that most reflect Him. Finding others than ourselves would mean knowing Him better.

If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

How we come to be, and how we are what we are, is beyond any understanding. I have been obsessed by this, trying to understand the very nature of my existence.

At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?

I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

I do find that I tend to write about big questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How do we relate to each other?

Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I'm the only person who can't understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they're not that great. These are questions everyone has.

I want to know why I'm alive. I want to understand. It's like exploration; it's like someone being interested in a place and its history, digging into the earth and looking for it, searching - it's a passion.

Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will, in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand.

I don't know any 21-year-old who's not having an existential crisis.