Quotes about curiosity

The simplest questions are the most profound.

Where were you born?

Where is your home?

Where are you going?

What are you doing?

Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change.

A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.

For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as "mankind's need for metaphysics."

The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions?

As a system for generating answers.

And what is the purpose of that?

...To know.

And what will you do with your knowledge?

...Find out more.

But why?

I don’t know. It’s the way I am.

I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?

A Philistine is someone who is content to live in a wholly unexplored world.

Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channelling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together.

"Curiosity killed the cat," said Hector, who was a little embarrassed by the turn the conversation had taken; nevertheless, he wanted to show himself a man's man, and something witty seemed called for. "I deny that," said Cobbler; "the cat probably died a happy martyr to research."