Quotes About Curiosity

Woolf is celebrating getting lost, not literally lost as in not knowing how to find your way, but lost as in open to the unknown, and the way that physical space can provide psychic space.

J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, "live always at the 'edge of mystery'—the boundary of the unknown.

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect ineffable.

Science doesn't reduce things, or explain mysteries away; it just discovers stranger and stranger things.

There's much more behind our thirst for monsters than curiosity or escapism. There is fear that the earth is loosing the last regions where myth can flourish.

Denn Erkenntnis – auch über uns selbst – lässt sich nicht im Gänsemarsch gewinnen. Und eine Gesellschaft, die das Suchen oder Forschen nicht zulässt, ist dem Untergang geweiht.

Ich war nie ein Wilder: zwar unangepasst, ein Sucher im Sinne von Geisteshaltung, Ideal, Ästhetik und Neugier. Und ich gehe weiterhin in die Wildnis: um einer gezähmten Welt zu entkommen, der wahren Menschennatur auf der Spur.

L'essentiel est de lire beaucoup. N'importe quoi. Ce qu'on a envie de lire. Le tri se fait après. Et même la mauvaise littérature est nourricière. La seule littérature stérilisante, la littérature prétentieuse, philosophisante, cuistre, est sans danger pour les enfants parce qu'ils ne peuvent pas pénétrer dedans. Ils la rejettent, comme ils tournent le bouton de la T.V. au moment des discours politiques. Ce sont des sages.

I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books.

The secret? If we have a cardinal strategy that forms the bedrock for all our practices, it may be this: Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row.

Why do the men come, do you suppose? Who knows why men do anything?

Sheep used to have wings. One flew into the sky and all the others followed. They took their wings off while feeding in the warm sun but the wind blew away their wings so they couldn't fly anymore. They had to return to earth by drifting to where the sky curves down and touches the land, and then walk round the long way.. i like that..

What is this stuff, do you know?" he asked. "No, I don't," said Hazel. "I've never seen it before." "There's a lot we don't know," said Blackberry. "About this place, I mean. The plants are new, the smells are new. We're going to need some new ideas ourselves." "Well, you're the fellow for ideas," said Hazel. "I never know anything until you tell me.

Why do the men come, do you suppose?" asked Fiver. "Who knows why men do anything? They may drive cows or sheep in the fields, or cut wood in the copses. What does it matter? I'd rather dodge a man than a stoat or a fox.

Those are rabbits down there, trotting along like a lot of squirrels with nuts. How can that be right?

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.

Why, Jon, why? his mother asked. Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers! I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know.

Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel. The same questions, asked again, bring you just the answers you need just the minute you need them.

Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

In every disaster, in every blessing, ask, Why me?       There's a reason, of course, there's an answer.

OK.… A blue feather." He looked at me blankly. "Richard? A blue feather?