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Hamm: Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!

 

Samuel Beckett

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Hamm: Look at the ocean!
(Clov gets down, takes a few steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, turns the telescope on the without, looks at length. He starts, lowers the telescope, examines it, turns it again on the without.)
Clov: Never seen anything like that!
Hamm (anxious): What? A sail? A fin? Smoke?
Clov (looking): The light is sunk.
Hamm (relieved): Pah! We all knew that.
Clov (looking): There was a bit left.
Hamm: The base.
Clov (looking): Yes.
Hamm: And now?
Clov (looking): All gone.
Hamm: No gulls?
Clov (looking): Gulls!
Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?
Clov (lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name could there be on the horizon? (Pause.)
Hamm: The waves, how are the waves?
Clov: The waves? (He turns the telescope on the waves.) Lead.
Hamm: And the sun?
Clov (looking): Zero.
Hamm: But it should be sinking. Look again.
Clov (looking): Damn the sun.
Hamm: Is it night already then?
Clov (looking): No.
Hamm: Then what is it?
Clov (looking): Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause. Still louder.) GRRAY! (Pause. He gets down, approaches Hamm from behind, whispers in his ear.)
Hamm (starting): Gray! Did I hear you say gray?
Clov: Light black. From pole to pole.

 

Samuel Beckett

 

We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as:
Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
Where did the laws of physics come from?
Why does the universe seem so strange?
My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted. They may be gleaned from existing faith traditions or from personal search. God may be apprehended as a remote Author without present-day agency, or as an interested Presence with whom one can form a relationship, or as pantheistic — Inherent in All Things.
The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no Beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the universe on — to ask Why Are Things As They Are? — is to generate the foundation for everything else.

 

Ursula Goodenough

 

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

 

Bertrand Russell

 

Hamm: What's he doing?
(CLOV raises lid of NAGG's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: He's crying.
(He closes lid, straightens up)
Hamm: Then he's living.

 

Samuel Beckett

 

To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.

 

Anatol Rapoport