Quotes About Curiosity

pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer.

Empty boxes, old newspapers, a milk jug, and a wine bottle." "You're identifying the contents of the garbage bag?" "No dead cats. Or live ones." "Maybe it's a Schrödinger's Hefty bag." I

That's the thing about space," she said. "So many smart people are so interested in it that it's difficult to come up with a really new idea.

On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who'd spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on. It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people's lives:

He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics.

What do you mean?" Yul asked.

Past Data should not be the basis of Present Truth. Data from a prior time or experience should always and only be the basis for new questions. Always the treasure should be in the question, not in the answer.

Do you really want an answer to all these questions, or are you just venting?

Right now your schools exist primarily to provide answers. It would be far more beneficial if their primary function was to ask questions. What does it mean to be honest, or responsible, or "fair"? What are the implications? For that matter, what does it mean that 2+2=4? What are the implications? Highly evolved societies encourage all children to discover and create those answers for themselves.

Sometimes when you open a book, time stops.

And I'm not assuming and I'm not judging. I'm just being curious.

How can you live without stars? What keeps you from thinking about yourself all the time?

But it suddenly makes sense: I'd like to be under the sea, as an octopus.

Good. Because right now I don't have you pegged as a yuppie. You're something else. I'm not sure what you are, but I'm going to find out." "Cool.

Why" is a nasty little Protestant word, you follow? Catholics, now, say, "Credo, I Believe," to whatever the Pope says. If you want to ask "Why?" go ask the Anglican vicar to instruct you in unbelief and he will let you "Why-why-why?" to your heart's content.

Jamie Smart has gone home and Adrian sits on the curb at the edge of the field, the bike propped against a lamppost. He can see the back garden. He's drinking a can of Fanta. He's feeling pretty good. He's six years old. A van pulls up. The worried-looking driver gets out and jogs across the quiet road. He said, "Mate—what's your name?

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?

Scientific inquiry shouldn't stop just because a reasonable explanation has apparently been found.

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

Our academic system rewards people who know a lot of stuff and generally we call those people smart, but at the end of the day who do you want- the person who can figure things out that they've never seen before or the person who can rattle off a bunch of facts?

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.