Humanity's greatest thinkers couldn't stop pondering these questions, and you won't be able to either.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
"What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?"
Lord Byron
"What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?"
Leo Tolstoy
"Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not."
Henry David Thoreau
"What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?"
Voltaire
"What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?"
Voltaire
"If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?"
Galileo Galilei
"Who indeed will set bounds to human ingenuity? Who will assert that everything in the universe capable of being perceived is already discovered and known?"
Bertrand Russell
"Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?"
Confucius
"A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?"
Plato
"Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
Friedrich Schiller
"But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age which besets him on all sides?"
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?"
Leo Tolstoy
"How can one be well...when one suffers morally?"
Stobaeus
"What use is knowledge if there is no understanding?"
Alain de Botton
"Must being in love always mean being in pain?"
John Lancaster Spalding
"If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?"
L.M. Montgomery
"Which would you rather be if you had the choice -- divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?”
Mary Wollstonecraft
"How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?"
Plato
"Truthfulness. He will never willingly tolerate an untruth, but will hate it as much as he loves truth... And is there anything more closely connected with wisdom than truth?"
Plato
"But the man who is ready to taste every form of knowledge, is glad to learn and never satisfied - he's the man who deserves to be called a philosopher, isn't he?"
Simone de Beauvoir
"What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the sleeping beauty?"
Confucius
"If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?"
Epictetus
"Who are those people by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not these whom you are in the habit of saying that they are mad? What then? Do you wish to be admired by the mad?"
Antonio Porchia
"Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?"
Friedrich Schiller
"Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?"
Stanislaw J. Lec
"If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?"
Epictetus
"Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?"
Mary Wollstonecraft
"What but a pestilential vapor can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies?"
Friedrich Schiller
"Our age is enlightened... How is it, then, that we still remain barbarians?"
Richard Brautigan
"Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?”
Immanuel Kant
"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?"
Aristotle
"It is clear, then, that wisdom is knowledge having to do with certain principles and causes. But now, since it is this knowledge that we are seeking, we must consider the following point: Of what kind of principles and of what kind of causes is wisdom the knowledge?"
From the teachings of Aristotle to the poetry of Lord Byron, history's most enlightened minds have always offered as many interesting questions as they have interesting answers.
Whether challenging God's place in the universe or pondering the curiosities of cats, the intriguing queries above represent some of the most thought-provoking inquiries in all of human history.
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