Quotes About Curiosity

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formula for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels--and I do--why don't I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child?

explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why.

What limpid lakes and cool date palms may our caravans have passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

At four Petie took to yelling at the heavenly bodies: —Hey, orbs! Wait for me! or, Orbs…listen to this! A genius, Lou thought; he commanded constellations. Clearly a poet.

They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.

a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old;

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.

She read books as one would breath air, to fill up and live.

The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament.

I WALKED. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world's scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route from the school to my friend's house. I mastered chunks of town in one direction only; I ignored the other direction

She follows the putrid cloud downstairs and

There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.

Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.

The American woman's interest does not lie in the man; she wants to be alone, and she can't be alone without dabbling, today in chemistry, to-morrow in physiology and the day after in Buddhism.

Spanish is the language of the early morning in Manhattan. Frightened people become angry people - as history teaches us again and again. The best of traveling companions: relentlessly curious, tireless and totally without fear.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.