Best 1374 quotes in «curiosity quotes» category

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

Why . . . would a penguin be in a piss pot?

Why-why-why!... Ask it of everything your mind touches, and let you mind touch everything!

Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.

Wonder at God's merciful love is a very practical emotion. Holy wonder will lead you to grateful worship and heartfelt thanksgiving. It will cause within you godly watchfulness; you will be afraid to sin against such a love as this.

Wondering about other people’s private affairs is a one-man gossip.

You are not a human being if you don't have a curiosity.

You dare travel on sacred road, although you may not know the end.

You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research.

You do not know the madness of scholarly curiosity, Mr Webster. To be interested, and at the same time disinterested…

You do not have to know which path you must take. That's not how life works. You simply must be curious and daring enough to take a step into the unknown. That's how you come to know.

You hand over control, you start winning.

You have everything already inside you necessary for the true response to any challenge you will meet. Usually, it’s just a question of assembling some elements in a way that you didn’t think to do before (which brings us to intuition…).

You have to be passionately curious in life.

You have the courage to take chances.

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You'll always be curious yet deliriously sinking into whatever your nightmare is until you let your wings know you're serious by leaping into your wildest dreams of self love.

Writing seems to free them (students) of the idea that math is a collection of right answers own by the teacher – a body of knowledge that she will dispense in chunks and that they have to swallow and digest.

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. “He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.

Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.

Yesterday I watched a curious nightfall. The cloud ceiling took on a warm tone, deepened, and departed as if drawn on a leash. I could no longer see the fat snow flying against the sky; I could see it only as it fell before dark objects. Any object at a distance –like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I see from the bay window- looked like a black and white frontispiece seen through a sheet of white tissue. It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed. The snow on the yard was blue as ink, faintly luminous; the sky violet. The bay window betrayed me, and started giving me back the room’s lamps. It was like dying, that growing dimmer and deeper and then going out.

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.

Your purpose, and its specific expressions, expands and accelerates as it becomes more similar to Nature’s purpose. The tools you need to apply it you collect along the path in discovering what that is. Time is there to provide you with the “opportunities” to find more creative responses to things like frustration, confusion and self-righteousness. As you gently, oh so gently and delicately, adjust to the requirements that exist in your actual circumstance, you are given the tools needed to surpass them.

You should never listen to experts, because in a few years everything they know to be 'true' will be disproven. It's how it's always been, and how it will always be. That's the power of discovery and curiosity.

You want to fix yourself, change yourself, become someone better. But what about who you already are? You want to craft a mask to wear—something to cover your face. But you already have a face. You are already something. Your task, as a human being, is not self-augmentation, but self-discovery. Look at yourself with curiosity. Let yourself explore your interests. Delve into your talents. Face your fears. Accept your faults, and give yourself unconditional love. By learning to explore yourself, you will naturally become the best version of yourself. Of course, you invent your life, but you do not invent your passions. Some things, you must create, and others you must discover. Learn to be curious about yourself. Then, you will be on the right path.

You wander. You work nearly every job known to man, it seems, only to arrive at the wonderings of philosophy.

You were very serious,” her grandmother continued. “You had these big brown eyes and you were always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ You wondered what everything was. You would frown and point a lot, like a conductor looking for your orchestra. You always seemed very busy, like you were between appointments all the time, but you were just a little child.

A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?

A bright eye indicates curiosity; a black eye, too much.

A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.

Acting's always felt like a kind of creature that lays dormant and collects observations when I'm not working. And then when I'm actually doing it, it just rises up. But everything I do is more about curiosity and investigation than it is about performance.

Actually, I've never thought myself as being a particularly hard worker. I've always worked, and I guess my mind is busy all the time. I've been in a lot of things just because of my own intellectual curiosity.

A curiosity prompt heightens the senses and hones compositional ability.

Adventure is just about doing something you’ve never done— doing it with enthusiasm and curiosity: doing something difficult with passion.

You may have noticed that the questions asked are better than the answers given. What do you expect? Perhaps we could submit these answers in a game and see if anyone could figure out what the hell the question was. “Ahh, how to be happy?

A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.

Aging only happens to people who lose their lust for getting better and disconnect from their natural base of curiosity.

Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.” -R. Daneel Olivaw

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

All children are curious, I think, but not all adults are.

All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

A free curiosity is more effective in learning than a rigid discipline.

Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life.

A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.

Among the lower classes of mankind there will be found very little desire of any other knowledge than what may contribute immediately to the relief of some pressing uneasiness, or the attainment of some near advantage.

Am I the only one who secretly hopes that the Curiosity rover will be swallowed up by a giant alien worm living just below Mars's surface?

Among the many inconsistencies which folly produces or infirmity suffers in the human mind, there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings... Those whom the appearance of virtue or the evidence of genius has tempted to a nearer knowledge of the writer, in whose performances they may be found, have indeed had frequent reason to repent their curiosity.