Quotes About Curiosity

Either the War Office had recruited Ramses - in which case I would have General Spencer's head on a platter - or Ramses had come across something that, in his opinion, merited investigation.... I am never guilty of idle speculation, so I kept an open mind on that. Except that once I caught up with him, I would have Ramses' head on another platter.

Why is a man with a knife after your blood? Who sent him? I would like to write the fellow a letter of thanks!

Die Englânder! Niemals werde ich sie verstehen!

I fink it is a femuw. A femuw of a winowcowus... A a-stinct winocowus.

All these lives, she said. All the stories we never know. (125)

Can one be bored in a world so wonderful?

Banned! My eyes light up, I think I see stars. Anything that has been banned by anyone must be something I'd like.

I studied you until I knew you, or at least, the public parts of you: your learning, your passion, the way your voice slows down when you answer a question. I studied your hands, and wondered how they'd touch me; your hair, and how it would smell. I wondered about that and about the rest of you I could not see. I wanted to know you. And I wanted you to know me. I wanted you to see me.

Close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware not only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. "Without mystery life shrinks," wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. "The completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.

From the side window smoke could be seen rising from the Westing house, but Sydelle Pulaski did not notice.

Read it out loud, dear," Grace ordered, as Angela opened the card tied to the yellow-ribboned box. To the bride-to-be in the kitchen stuck, An asparagus cooker and lots of luck. from Cookie Barfspringer "Thank you," Angela said, wondering which one was the Barfspringer. The next gift was an egg poacher. The box in pink ribbons contained another asparagus cooker. "I sure hope Doctor Deere likes asparagus," someone remarked.

I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.

[On Rear Window:] I'll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, "It's none of my business." They could pull down their blinds, but they never do; they stand there and look out.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

O! cette ville n'est remarquable que parce qu'elle est composée de maisons comme toutes les villes et que toutes ses maisons ressemblent à toutes les maisons! ...pas curious du tout / La vérité me force? Nous sommes les hommes libres! Nous devons donc désobéir, même à la vérité.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

strange shape appeared, moving deliberately across a nearby section of their old floe.

Charles Darwin, on first seeing these waves breaking on Tierra del Fuego in 1833, wrote in his diary:

along with Sirius, an older puppy from an earlier litter

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise

In the real world, it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.