Quotes About Curiosity

Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge

If we teach only the findings and products of science – no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be – without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Our passion for learning is our tool for survival.

Skepticism must be a component of the explorer's toolkit, or we will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival.

There's plenty of housework to be done here on Earth, and our commitment to it must be steadfast. But we're the kind of species that needs a frontier—for fundamental biological reasons. Every time humanity stretches itself and turns a new corner, it receives a jolt of productive vitality that can carry it for centuries.

For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

Our particular causality scheme has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far inferior to what might have been, and may one day be.

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject 

Toda nuestra ciencia, comparada con la realidad, es primitiva e infantil… y sin embargo es lo más preciado que tenemos. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)

If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there.

Mašta ?e nas ?esto odvoditi do svjetova kojih nikada nije bilo. Ali bez nje nikamo ne bismo stigli. Sumnja nam omogu?uje da razlu?imo maštu od ?injenica, da provjerimo naša razmišljanja.

I don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: a proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright.

There's a certain discipline involved. We can't just go off shouting 'little green men' every time we detect something we don't at first understand, because we're going to look mighty silly when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It's permitted to not be sure.

Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time.

the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

Nuestro planeta y nuestro sistema solar se hallan rodeados por un nuevo mundo oceánico, las profundidades del espacio. Y no es más infranqueable que el de otras épocas. Quizá todavía es pronto. Puede que no haya llegado el momento. Pero esos otros mundos, que prometen indecibles oportunidades, nos hacen señas.

I do not imagine that many people in the fifteenth century ever wondered if they were living in the Italian Renaissance.

The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties.

Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind's—on the human condition.…

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it

what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.