Quotes About Curiosity

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.

Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing--rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read--tend to be frustrated when they can't rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called "looking for optionality.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently , for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don't attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.

scholars—scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.

There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know.

Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why

an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the

in spite of having spent some time in libraries I feel that I am truly an amateur in the subject matter).

some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of "heuristics," these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets.

what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know.

only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):