Quotes About Curiosity

I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries, if he should be so happy as to have made any that are valuable.

The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people 

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

Do not all these things interest you? Isn't it a fine thing to be alive when so many great things are happening?

And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show. Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is but that which he hath seene? What if within the Moones fayre shining sphere, What if in euery other starre vnseene Of other worldes he happily should heare?

For me, as for many kids, words had a magical (and sometimes sexual) aura, and I would look up in my mother's medical dictionary words such as penis , intercourse , or homosexuality , exciting words no matter how dispiriting the definition, exciting just because they appeared in print.

Whoever has not known the pleasures of open stacks—with their erotically charged corridors.

Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.

The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other's shoes than their sexual availability.

Se o Velho e o Novo Testamentos representam a Revelação Divina, tais investigações não têm importância. Se eles são obra puramente humana, então é a curiosidade humana que nos impele a investigar como foram escritos e qual é sua relação com um culto de imenso prestígio

It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.

For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel strong frame...four hundred ninety-seven dollars; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, crysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

Is that Rococo, Pascal?" Chrissie said as she stood by the missus's desk, peering into the nests of pigeonholes and cubbies. "Oh, don't touch there or you'll be shot," Pascal said, because it was where the missus kept her souvenirs, love letters from men before him, locks of hair, dried shamrock, and the words of songs that she rehearsed for her parties. Her family was musical

Maddened by Mystery.

Freedom is the first step to curiosity and knowledge.

Freedom is the first step to curiosity and knowledge. -V6

What obsesses me more than anything in the world . . . is why some things happen and why other things don't. It doesn't seem to me there is any logic, any way of . . . you know . . .

The historian, like any other scientist, is an animal who incessantly asks the question: Why?

Boy, are you fuckin' those worms again?

Perversity, sadism, sexual aberration, etc., are parts of the nomenclature of the human spirit—just like altruism, fellowship, love, and all that. No, I'm not saying it's cool to be perverse, sadistic, and sexually aberrant, but I think it's honest to be curious about the very worst that humanity has to offer, and the very worst manner in which mankind has presented itself. Not only is it honest, I dare say it's healthy

It was a curious sort of immortality. Everyone in the world would repeat one hour, forever, and never realize that time had come to a quivering halt at that point. And Myron Castleman would be permitted to live forever, piling up experiences and memories, but each of only an hour's duration, each resumed at 12:01 PM on this balmy spring day in Manhattan, standing outside near the Grand Central Tower.

Gotham admired Maeve. By day she managed money, and did it brilliantly, but she didn't find it satisfied her intellect. She spoke four languages. She played the piano seriously well. And she read books. Lots of them.

And to learn, he must be curious and also humble. For a proud man never learns anything.