Quotes About Curiosity

if so great be thy yearning to know of our sorrows

There they were," she went on, "the stars. And he asked himself, my great-grandfather — that boy: 'What are they? Why are they? And who am I?' as one does, sitting alone, with no one to talk to, looking at the stars.

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

She read everything.

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

Marvelous are the innocent.

What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.

Books - books - books, said Helen, in her absent-minded way. More new books - I wonder what you find in them...

No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.

Heaven has mercifully decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist.

In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.

I like observing people. I like looking at things.

Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, 'dear to God as we are'; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, 'we are in utter darkness'. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!

Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen;

If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them.

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.

For Orlando's taste was broad; he was no lover of garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination for him.

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.