Quotes About Curiosity

By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?

Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?

SEEING THE WORLD "In the fifties, when my mother began lobbying for a trip to Europe, my father, who had been brought to Missouri from the Ukraine when he was two, said, 'I been.' 

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

Her biggest fault - perplexing to this day - is that Mother loves to pick trash. Its an adventure, she says. You never know what surprises you'll find

Thank goodness for the first snow, it was a reminder--no matter how old you became and how much you'd seen, things could still be new if you were willing to believe they still mattered.

Meanwhile I'll probably see him again. That's how sick I am.

There are a great many things I would do a study on if I had the time, materials and funding. It bothers me that I can't. I wonder if others are irked by this, this incessant drive to plumb a million things and the inability to delve adequately into any one of them.

That was the difference between him and Woodward. Woodward went into a garage to find a source who could tell him what Nixon's men were up to. Bernstein walked in to find an eight-pound chain cut neatly in two and his bike gone.

When Yancy arrived, Sonny Summers was at a two-top morosely scanning the menu. "What looks good?" Yancy joked. "The door.

Coroners made Al Garcia jumpy; they always got so cheery when somebody came up with a fresh way to die.

Nobody with a living brain cell goes into the newspaper business for the money. They're in it because digging up the truth is interesting and consequential work, and for sheer entertainment it beats the hell out of humping product for GE or Microsoft.

What happened to your eye, young lady?" "I fell down the stairs. What happened to your hair?

Jim Tile was questioning Augustine about the skulls on the wall. "Cuban voodoo?

Twin bells, those questions

Knowing the songs - and I'm still learning - lets one envision birds you can hear but can't see. And as always, the ability to envision what is just out of sight is more important than merely seeing what's right in front of you.

Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

But I could be wrong.

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.

My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic.

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.