Quotes About Curiosity

We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.

I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.

Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don't. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.

What was this curious, syntactically repetitive emotion? It expressed a certain reflexivity about the amorous state, it meant deriving more pleasure from one's own emotional enthusiasm than from the object of affection which had elicited it.

The wish to sleep with certain people can arise in us long before we have had the chance to get to know them properly – before, that is, we have had any opportunity to sit down and have a discussion with them about their history, interests and feelings.

It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved

Kendimizi bildik bileli burçlara ve kiÅŸisel fallara merak duymam?z?n nedeni,anla??lma tutkumuzu uyand?r?yor olmalar?d?r.

Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real selves.

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.

Als we ons met de instelling van de reiziger [met ontvankelijkheid als voornaamste kenmerk] door onze eigen omgeving bewogen, zou deze wellicht niet minder interessant blijken dan de hoge bergpassen en de oerwouden vol vlinders in Humboldts Zuid-Amerika.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing.

Everything is amazing—once.

If a traveller was to feel personally involved with (rather than guiltily obedient towards) 'the walls and ceilings of the church decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes and paintings...', he or she would have to be able to connect these facts--as boring as a fly--with one of the large, blunt questions to which genuine curiosity must be anchored.

We may ask of our destinations, 'Help me feel more generous, less afraid, always curious. Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.

On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.

Instead of bringing back sixteen thousand new plant species, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.

he should always be the one to ask questions, and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his

The premodern world directed us to read so little because it was obsessed by a question modernity likes to dodge: what is the point of reading?

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it.

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.