Best 1374 quotes in «curiosity quotes» category

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

From time to time I once wondered how one wanders from time to time And think up the paradox line Speak of Epoch's crime Oh I lied, it hasn't happened yet But bet you better believe it's such a habit that I just said that in a past mindset

General attitude and outlook—the way we perceive and experience anything—is more influenced by our physical state than anything other single factor. I’d guess that for most of us, at least 50% of our struggles and discontent are brought on by being physically out of balance. The causes of that imbalance are many, but at the core, there’s an insensitivity or inability to locate and maneuver essential physical processes within us: how to breathe, how to sit, stand and walk, how to see and hear, how to slow down or speed up, how to relax, how to sleep, how to eat, how to adjust our physiological responses to the different circumstances we find ourselves within. This kind of removal or abstraction from our physicality causes an enormous amount of problems on many levels. One key result of it is a distrust in our own ability to influence our emotional state and our energy and perspectives in general; we often feel that we can’t get our hands on the control switches, as if most of life just happens and we can’t do much about it.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability - a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.

Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.

Get curious, read energy. The future belongs to people who are curious, people who can sense – Sense the energies in their surroundings and translate them to business direction.

God has made all things that are in the world to be our teachers.

God transcends even the undertakings of evangelical theologians.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

Good conversation comes form just such flexibility. As observations come up, it meanders, following a course that tends in a particular direction, but moves responsively in new directions as associations are triggered, words are paused over to consider their implications, examples are invented, connections are made. Like jazz, it is a work of improvisation that entails listening intently for what the others are doing and moving with them. The curiosity which sustains that intensity pauses at every turn to notice what's happening, to raise new questions and pursue them. In a gentle pursuit of ideas, it makes room for the unexpected. Exercised in this way, curiosity becomes an avenue of grace. Conversation pursued in this spirit is full of surprise. It connects one idea or thought or analogy with another in ways that could not have been predicted.

Had a person attempted to taste me so soon after we met, I would have been alarmed; but since Athena was an octopus, I was thrilled. Although we couldn’t have been more different — I, a terrestrial vertebrate constrained by joints and bound to air; she, a marine mollusk with not a single bone, who breathed water — she was clearly as curious about me as I was about her.

Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.

Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void that ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four he was expounding such inquiries as: ‘Why do squares have more sides than triangles?’ ‘How will we see when the sun goes dark?’ ‘Do flowers grow under the ocean?’ ‘Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?

Habitual excuses for inactivity indicates little or no interest in what one ought to have done.

Harness your curiosity to initiate conversations and open avenues of dialogue.

Hannah was full of admiration for Tom's knowledge...He'd come to understand, though, that it wasn't really flattery; instead it was a sort of delight that was roused in Hannah for anything she didn't know; anything new to her. She could never come to the end of all that pleased her.

Having no curiosity can be a dangerous thing..

Having no interest or being curious about nothing is just another way to pose questions. This invites a sweet paradox that even thought about lack of curiosity may make a person curious about the lack of curiosity. Where is it?

Healthy curiosity is a great key in innovation.

He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.

He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush's parents on his Andover application

He learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

He read as much as his curiosity demanded - which is to say all

Henry Adams observes that John Hay has the ability to take the world as a whole rather than pulling it to pieces in criticism. He also observes that, in the routine of a stressful job, this perspective is challenged

He likes to know things. He checks out book and record collections when he visits people, looks in medicine cabinets, takes inventory in refrigerators. He eaves drops on conversations at public phone booths. He reads murder victims' mail.

He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.

Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.

He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed.

Her grandmother had once told her that one of life's best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish -- to just ask the question.

he was almost joyously what he had always been, a lot of gee whiz, it was all new and fresh even when surely he had seen much of it before, and it was as if he took delight in not having been changed externally by all that he had seen.

He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.

He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

His eyes spark with revolutions, enlightened trickery and unconditional affection.

He wrote as a young man that God's noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.

History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.

Historians are great gossips at a high level.

His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.

History is made by those who see beyond what already exists. They see all the things that don’t yet.

His work was defined by emphasis on the subversiveness philosophy, which asks questions, as opposed to the self-satisfaction of politics, which believes it has answers and insists on them.

How could we have discovered great lands, if we dare not travel?

How does one instill curiosity? Without it this 'educational' process is a continual struggle between a student who is trying to get by and a teacher who is trying to catch him at it, neither profiting.

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.

How is it possible to know so much about a person and yet know nothing at all?

How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story "Nightfall," about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove people mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.

I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.

Humans became the only species to acquire guidance on how to live from the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors, rather than just from their DNA.

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one… The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

I am ordinary person with extraordinary curiosity.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class