A Quote by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Quote Topics

Answer Anyway Becomes How Itself Lifetime Lives Our Our Lives Question Read Real Search Seek Spend Task

Quote Author

Lynne Sharon Schwartz
American - Writer
Born: March 19, 1939

To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade or two to find an answer. Then the answer they get may not even answer the question they thought it would. You have to have a supple enough mind to be open to the possibility that the answer sometimes precedes the question itself.

Hanya Yanagihara

"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

Julian Jaynes

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.

Stuart J. Russell

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

Sam Harris

We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask - and to answer - the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.

Matthew Woodring Stover

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

John F. Kennedy

We go through our lives in a continual dance of being filled with something that needs an answer, and then going out and finding that answer... only to find out that our answer wasn't quite the answer.

Guy Finley

The very desire to seek spiritual enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The 'perfect practice' is therefore not to search for enlightenment but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already are enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit.

Ken Wilber

The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question.

Bruce Mau

Intellectuals know how to answer the question, 'What God do I believe in?' not only through the question of 'What God do I abhor?' Intellectuals can also answer the question of 'What flag do I wave?' without having to answer the question of 'What flag do I burn.'

Yair Lapid

Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past - let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

John F. Kennedy

I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don't know the answer yet.

Ellen Barkin

Question: When you’re one of the few people who can do something to fix a problem, just how responsible does that make you for it? Answer: It’s how you choose to answer that question that defines you.

Karen Marie Moning

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, but 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.

Ken Kesey

In the upshot there is only one answer for the preacher who wonders whether he is worthy to preach the sermon he has composed or for the writer who wonders whether he is worthy to write the religious book he is working on. The answer is: Of course not. To ask yourself: Am I worthy to perform this Christian task? is really the peak of pride and presumption. For the very question carries the implication that we spend most of our time doing things we are worthy to do. We simply do not have that kind of worth.