Quotes about curiosity

You don't have to be a qualified scientist to experiment with the world. Knowing some basic principles will set you on the right track... [I]t doesn't even have to be an organized process...

If you’d keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you, you wouldn’t hear so much that offends you.

The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.

Fifty years ago, Bowman would have been considered a specialist in applied astronomy, cybernetics, and space propulsion systems — yet he was prone to deny, with genuine indignation, that he was a specialist at all. Bowman had never found it possible to focus his interest exclusively on any subject; despite the dark warnings of his instructors, he had insisted on taking his Master's degree in General Astronautics — a course with a vague and woolly syllabus, designed for those whose IQs were in the low 130s and who would never reach the top ranks of their profession.

His decision had been right; that very refusal to specialize had made him uniquely qualified for his present task.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought.

And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know.

They were old enough to know such things were forbidden, yet young enough still to find the forbidden irresistible rather than terrifying.

Ordinary people can never fall over the walls, because they never dare climb high enough to see what is beyond the walls.

If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is the father. After all, you cannot produce something interesting if you are not interested in something. Outputs need inputs.

Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure.

The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.

One form of insanity bears the name curiosity.