Quotes About Curiosity

What makes you think you know more than the experts? (The answer is that you don't know more, you know less—which sometimes is a good thing.) Another

In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.

This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: "Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.")

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer observed that questions "are the engines of intellect5—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.

Yet chances are, for the rest of her life, that four-year-old girl will never again ask questions as instinctively, as imaginatively, or as freely as she does at that shining moment. Unless she is exceptional, that age is her questioning peak.

Being willing to question is one thing; questioning well and effectively is another.

All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have "all the answers" in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers

Cooperrider says that "organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.

In a time when so much of what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.

when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it's necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.

A journey of inquiry that (hopefully) culminates in change can be a long road, with pitfalls and detours and often nary an answer in sight. That's why it can be helpful to approach inquiry systematically, as a step-by-step progression. The best innovators are able to live with not having the answer right away because they're focused on just trying to get to the next question.

If we're born to inquire, then why must it be taught?

What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing it down? I

Everything that's ever happened to you or occurred to you in your life informs every decision you make—and also influences what questions you decide to ask. So it can be useful to step back and inquire, Why did I come up with that question?" Burton adds, "Every time you come up with a question, you should be wondering, What are the underlying assumptions of that question? Is there a different question I should be asking?

What would happen if this happens?' I do that on my own—I do all of my exploring outside of school. Because in school it's not allowed and that just . . . really sucks."   If

One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us "to organize our thinking around18 what we don't know.

The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How stage; but it's critical to innovation that there be a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.

You don't learn unless you question.

Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything." After

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." Beginner's

Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, "Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.

What's required is a willingness to go out into the world with a curious and open mind, to observe closely, and—perhaps most important, according to a number of the questioners I've interviewed—to listen.

when he came home from school, "while other mothers asked their kids 'Did you learn anything today?' [my mother ] would say, 'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?

This works well under most circumstances, but when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily.