Quotes About Curiosity

Never memorize something that you can look up.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. —"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.

He didn't know about Clara Rockmore and her Town Hall debut. He had no idea she was still performing—just recently before a crowd of 4,500 in Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium. And he didn't know the inventor was alive and living in Russia after fleeing New York as a Soviet spy a decade earlier. He just knew he had to build this thing.

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign people. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing if higher value than truth itself

Don't waste your time asking somebody else's question.

Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something, to reach something That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have footing.

All my life I have made an intensive study of dogs. Thirty years ago I knew everything about them that could be known, and much more. After three decades of much closer study of them and their ways, I find to my dismay that I know almost nothing at all about them. I have scarcely scratched the surface. That is not false modesty. It is sickeningly true. The sum total of my canine knowledge and experience and observation is this: Anything can happen; and usually it does.

Ordinarily it would have been great fun for her to run up to this huge and gentle-looking collie and pat him. But the terrors of her parents' lecture were still fresh in her baby mind.

But-where in blue blazes did a thoroughbred collie ever pick up that bulldog grip?

Be laborious," it says, "like the Star, and procure the light of the Sages, and hide yourself from the Stupid Profane and the Ambitious, and be like the Owl, which sees only by night, and hides itself from treacherous curiosity.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

I wanted to live among books.

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

I am well content that it should remain a mystery. What a dull world if we knew all about geese.