Quotes About Curiosity

If I have any advice for you, it comes down to this: never imagine you know more than you do. Because the truth is, you almost certainly know less than you think.

How unsettling is it, she wonders, to fool around with ferrets watching you? Their beady button eyes.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

The Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys while the cat by the fire is curled. Then away they floats in their eggshell boats, down the drains to their underground world.

Sweet dreams." Elena gave her a blank look. "That seems very unlikely.

Hi there," he said. "I hear you need to see a man about a frog.

Curiosity is not a thirst that can be slaked: it is a permanent condition. Every answer points to more and sometimes more profound questions. And knowledge, by itself, achieves nothing: we want more, we want something elusive, called understanding, or wisdom. We want both the big picture, and our place in it.

Reading is a source of potency, I said, so manage it like an asset. Become a walking encyclopedia of answers for anyone who has questions.

Childhood was a fantastic country to live in.

Boredom is only for boring people with no imagination.

You get to be about eleven or twelve and everything's old hat. They've drummed the miraculous out of you, but you don't want it to be like that. You want the miraculous. You want everything to still be new.

when you're a little kid. Everything is a sparkling wonder.

I figured we'd just do what we always do: stick our noses in where they don't belong and see what happens.

We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think: That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn't it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?

Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought." We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

The question you should be asking isn't, "What do I want?" or "What are my goals?" but "What would excite me?

Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences." Kevin Kelly

Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.

Age doesn't matter: an open mind does.

take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. . . . This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don't need to know where it's all going.

The means of learning are abundant—it's the desire to learn that's scarce.

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. —PAULA POUNDSTONE

there has never been a better time for testing the uncommon.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. —PAUL THEROUX, To the Ends of the Earth