quotations about curiosity
I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
The Complete Essays
To every investigator there come moments when his thought is baffled, when the limits of experimental possibility seem to have been reached and he faces a barrier which defies his curiosity. Then it is that imagination, like a glorious greyhound, comes bounding along, leaps the barrier, and a vision is flashed before his mind--a vision no doubt that is partly false, but a vision that may be partly true. It stirs up new ideas in the thoughts of the investigator, it fires him with a fresh enthusiasm and his curiosity spurs him on to further endeavors.
VIBERT DOUGLAS
The Atlantic Monthly, August 1929
A sense of curiosity is nature's original school of education.
SMILEY BLANTON
Love or Perish
Curiosity is a good thing, like onion soup. But too much onion soup makes your breath smell terrible. And too much curiosity can make your whole body smell terrible, if it causes you to be dead.
MICHAEL REISMAN
Simon Bloom: The Gravity Keeper
If curiosity killed the cat it was because the cat extended it beyond the question of whether yonder moving spot was edible.
PAUL SHEPARD
Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature
Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.
KERI HULME
The Bone People
Curiosity in children ... is but an appetite after knowledge and therefore ought to be encouraged in them, not only as a good sign, but as the great instrument nature has provided to remove that ignorance they were born with and which, without this busy inquisitiveness, will make them dull and useless creatures.
JOHN LOCKE
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Eve and the apple was the first great step in experimental science.
JAMES BRIDIE
Mr. Bolfry
Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.
GRAHAM SWIFT
Waterland
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
RENé DESCARTES
Le Discourse de la Méthode
Human curiosity, though at first slowly excited, being at last possessed of leisure for indulging its propensity, becomes one of the greatest amusements of life, and gives higher satisfaction than what even the senses can afford.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
A History of the Earth and Animated Nature
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Essays on Taste, and the Pleasures of the Imagination
There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
KURT VONNEGUT
Mother Night
Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all -- that has been my religion.
JOHN BURROUGHS
attributed, What Liberals Believe
Curiosity is the forerunner of discovery.
DUKE
attributed, Day's Collacon
All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in this suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions.
MARSTON BATES
The Nature of Natural History
Curiosity is a fragile thing, easily dissipated by more pressing concerns unless it's encouraged and guided into subsequent inquiry. The crucial moment when curiosity is either developed or dropped is the point at which a problem is articulated. It is the moment when "I wonder what..." is replaced by, "What if I..." or "Why don't we try to..." We can put this more formally: in order for curiosity to be educationally productive, it must be turned into problem-solving. This transformation occurs when a problem is set. Problem-setting is the process by which a matter of curiosity is articulated in such a way that it becomes amenable to inquiry that is relatively systematic.
DONALD ARNSTINE
Democracy and the Arts of Schooling
Curiosity, the overwhelming desire to know, is not characteristic of dead matter. Nor does it seem to be characteristic of some forms of living organism, which, for that very reason, we can scarcely bring ourselves to consider alive.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Asimov's New Guide to Science
Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts.
CLARENCE DAY
This Simian World
The love of variety, or curiosity of seeing new things, seems wove into the frame of every son and daughter of Adam; we usually speak of it as one of nature's levities, though planted within us for the solid purpose of carrying forward the mind to fresh inquiry and knowledge; strip us of it, the mind would doze forever over the present page; and we should all of us rest at ease with such objects as presented themselves in the parish or province where we first drew breath.
JOHN EPPS
Horae Phrenologicae