Curiosity Quotes

Science is a satisfactory curiosity.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

If he (Teddy Roosevelt) lacked Will Taft's immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

(Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with girls'stories such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization.

~ Jeff Jarvis

In the real world, the tests are all open book.

~ Jeff Jarvis

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.

~ Harvey Mansfield

Movies lost their appeal when people realized their real lives were more interesting.

~ Star Trek Enterprise

Be curious! Curiosity is the mother of all knowledge.

~ Debasish Mridha

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

~ Daniel J. Rice

Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips...

~ Edward O. Wilson

The time travelers are usually adapt at intercrossing different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage.

~ Steven Johnson

She'd been mad for him as a girl, but she'd chalked that up to youthful infatuation. She'd tracked the events of his life religiously for a decade, but she'd told herself that was idle curiosity. And now... now she desired him so much she could scarcely stand, but surely that was only lust. Wasn't it?

~ Tessa Dare

Very early it was noticed that I had a good memory, therefore I was insistently tormented with learning everything by heart.

~ Catherine The Great

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

~ John Adams

The author perceptively outlines what might be an underrated aspect of his subject and of many others whose public achievements are of note – a gift for friendship. McCullough says Adams, despite his towering intellect and curmudgeonly demeanor, had a soft heart for other people and a genuine interest in their particulars.

~ David Mccullough

Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.

~ Steven Johnson

If you want to be relevant only in your household, then you only need to know the things that are important in your house, and if you want to be relevant in your neighborhood, you need to know what's important in your neighborhood. The same thing applies to your city, state, and country. And if you want to be relevant to the entire world, program that computer known as your brain with all kinds of information from everywhere in order to prepare yourself.

~ Ben Carson

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Rather than literally burning the midnight oil, which he judged to be unhealthy, John Adams advised his son to make the most of college by developing an inquisitive outlook that would prompt him to get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. Ask them about their tutors, manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables. Fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.

~ David Mccullough

One of the many drawbacks of this I teach what I am approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

~ Maureen Corrigan

For Tolstoy . . . anything that human beings do has its glory. . . . I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.

~ Mark Van Doren

Curiosity deepest connection that we have with knowledge, wisdom and life. Incuriosity is cutting all these connections.

~ Baris Gencel

And I'm not assuming and I'm not judging. I'm just being curious.

~ Ned Vizzini

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

~ C.s. Lewis

It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.

~ Jack Finney

A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiviness is bitter or sweet.

~ Pema Chödrön

Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.

~ Michel Foucault

Caring means cultivating the skills of an active listener. That is easier said than done, as an anecdote about the extraordinary social skills of British politicianBenjamin Disraeli and his rival William Gladstone illustrates ... The rivalry between the two statesmen piqued the curiosity of American Jennie Jerome, admired beauty and the mother of Winston Churchill. Ms. Jerome arranged to dine with Gladstone and then with Disraeli, on consecutive evenings. Afterward, she described the difference between the two men this way: When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.

~ Marian Deegan

I just wish Mary Elizabeth would ask me questions other than “What's up?

~ Stephen Chbosky

Most students have to do some work to resuscitate their childlike curiosity. The best way to do that is to start asking questions again—lots of them.

~ Hal B. Gregersen

Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.

~ Eli Pariser

Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

~ Françoise Sagan

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience...

~ Thomas Hardy

Science is not an intelligence test. Intuition is important, knowing what kind of questions to ask. The other thing is a passion for getting to the core of the problem.

~ Torsten Wiesel

I think I'm more curious than I used to be - curious about why people live like they do and how they make sense of their time... Do they see how the sun has made it like a champion around the world overnight, and that all day today we get another chance to be brave, to exercise our humanity with boldness and deft precision?

~ Dee Williams

For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of like-minded, and savoring teachers who seemed to be ambassadors from other, richer, writer worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.

~ Jon Meacham

More interest you have more knowledge you have and more knowledge you have more questions you have and more questions means more wisdom you have and you are already inside the vein of life which is running with enormous speed.

~ Baris Gencel

Curiosity is a terrible thing, he was thinking. How is it possible to stop oneself from needing to know?

~ Brian Evenson

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.

~ Jon Meacham