Quotes About Curiosity

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off. Note : Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb)

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.

What did you ask at school today

Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"--I never did find out what that meant.

I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.

My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.

In this fashion, knowledge begets questions which beget new technology which provides answers--which in turn beget questions. This is the implacable carousel of research.

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr

I don't know everything. And I like not knowing everything. Because then I can learn it.

discovery starts with anomalies.

Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.

Know something about something. Don't just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

The cool feats of our scientific men are known to us all – such as that of Sir Humphry Davy inhaling a particular gas with an accurate report every minute or two of its successive effects upon his brain and sense.

window. All the ruckus, of course, woke up everyone in the house. Lilly's room was right up there. She

It has always seemed to me that there is something big to be felt by a man who has made up his mind to leave the things he knows and go off to strange places.

But the truth is I found out about Davy in the usual way a small boy finds out things he is denied to know by older people, and that is through other small boys.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

If you only knew the beauty which awaits you, Daniel. If you only knew how lovely are the realms which lie beyond this house. Would you keep yourself locked in a barren cell when all the beauties of the universe await you on the outside?

Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else. (from The Conqueror)

The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped?