Quotes About Curiosity

My definition of a good book is one that you would read for pleasure despite having no prior interest in the subject. The ostensible subject may be whale hunting, or survival in Auschwitz, or waking up as a cockroach—but you don't read it because you're into fisheries or Nazis or entomology: you read it because your life was poorer before you started it, and because now you can't stop.

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

One thing my experience has showed me is that spiritually alive people tend to be insatiably curious about the Divine Presence, refuse to settle for cliché-heavy religion, and feel little obligation to believe something because they are told they must.

Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book.

Hmm. That's what I suspected, you mad bastard.

George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon provides one of the simplest definitions of curiosity: the feeling of deprivation that comes from an information gap between what we know and what we want to know. Separately

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn't, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is saying with remembered my name & I am bid to John Hewitt's at 8 tomorrow. Shall I ask him if he's a homo? It's the only thing I really want to know about him, you see. I don't even care why he packed up writing.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

Outside, Melliphant's ear flattened itself against the wood of the door like a pale slug.

Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.

Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things?

I like so many different kinds of music just because all I did was listen to the radio as a kid.

Who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught?

He reached into the grate, picked out a couple of scraps, smoothed them out, leaning close to the flickering light. He was curious to see what it was Zoia had decided to destroy.

The only thing I know is that I know nothing' Socrates

Doubt is not a fearful thing," Feynman observed, "but a thing of very great value.

Quit pretending you know things you don't and start running experiments.

Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.

I sense the ambition and ease of a generation that has grown up on a much smaller planet. Those who consider travel an ordinary adventure rather than a grand expedition, for whom a quiet life is considered a slow death. I see this child of the world and can't help but think how fate probably would have played out differently had his father been driven by the same curiosity. If he had not lived in another day. If he had known how to free himself.

Tu n'étais pas comme les autres car tu regardais toujours au-delà des choses… Tu voulais toujours voir ce qui n'existait pas.

Chacun était curieux de voir à quoi pouvait bien ressembler une collation.

Believe marvels exist around you, inside others, within yourself. Go search for them. Gallop through life and without dismounting your horse manage (like a Cossack!) to pick up bits of otherworldliness lying on the path. Feed your imagination that way. That way, shape your destiny.

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.