Quotes About Curiosity

I've got a 12-year-old grandson who, when he was 3 years old, before he could say many other words, could name the different kinds of dinosaurs.

Ever since third grade, I had a notebook and was putting together words just for fun. I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects.

I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

I'm a great believer in the principle of try it and work it out. If a gadget is designed well, you can easily work out how to use it. But if you can't, it isn't shameful to read the instructions.

If there is something that I should know how to do but don't, it bugs me. I feel like I have to sit down and work out exactly what the problem is.

Scientists need to be prepared to engage, and the best people to engage with are students, ideally from primary school because there's no question that their capacity to work out complex things is extremely good.

It's important that people are open. Some people say, 'I'm going to be a doctor,' and they're a really good doctor. But for the rest of us, it's a big question mark. Just giving yourself a break, letting yourself try new things, and when something doesn't work out, moving along... it's all we can really do.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

I could live a thousand years and still not know everything, still not have tried anything.

I buy thousands of books a year.

I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

Human exploration is something that's been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?

When I was acting, I was always asking abut the mechanics of filmmaking. I decided I would learn what everyone on set was doing, so I would feel less threatened.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

I don't really have a three-year plan or a five-year plan. I don't know what's next, and that's what I find quite exciting. I dig it.

Thrift shopping is all about going into the thrift shop and having no expectation of what you might find.

I have always gotten a thrill, a kick, from learning new things.

I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.