Quotes About Curiosity

I can't bear those people who only talk about arthritis and ring roads and television and mending gutters, although one does recognize the need for them, if only because they occasionally provide babies who grow up to be more interesting.

Did they realise, as they sat huddled together in the corner of the snug, that they were all outsiders in one way or another? Marked apart by the fierceness of their curiosity, they moved among the docile majority unacknowledged, mistrusted and unloved to the point where they only found solace in one another's company.

The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.

It's only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance and begun to understand the great vistas of nonknowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.

Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted].

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

I'm not as I was but at this present moment I have to say, I feel very envious of someone who's young and active and starting out in the argument. Just think of the extraordinary things that are waiting to be known

This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the "infinite capacity for taking pains" that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

In our world, surely the worst thing anyone can say is; 'No further inquiry is needed. You've already got all you need to know.' It is the most sinister and dangerous thing.

To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.

por qué iban «ellos» a molestarse con el tedio de la existencia humana, y menos aún con el del gobierno humano?

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? The

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response - which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up - contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.

His life has been lived, so far, within narrow limits and he is quite naïve about most kinds of experience; he fears it and yet is wildly eager for it. To reassure himself, he converts it into epic myth as fast as it happens. He is forever play-acting.

You could always go back to school," Louise said. "You're never too old to learn." "But there's just so much. Not just this world, but so many others. By the time I got caught up, I would be too old." "To spend the rest of your life learning?" Louise asked, shaking her head in wonderment. "What could be better than that?" Such a twenty-fourth-century attitude, Clare thought.

Faustus: «Come, I think hell's a fable». Mephistopheles: «Ay, think so still, until experience change thy mind».

No one knows why, but second only to eating the brains of the living, the dead love affordable prefab furniture.

She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species.

Charlie Asher: Mrs. Ling, is that duck wearing trousers? Mrs. Ling: Could be . . . . You hear of paper-wrap chicken? This duck in pants.

We really have to get going, Sam said. Can we leave the car here and pick it up later? The monk said, Does a dog have a Buddha nature? Does a fish have a watertight asshole? said Coyote.