Curiosity Quotes

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

~ Henry James

It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It's as simple as that.

~ Tove Jansson

Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.

~ Daniel Quinn

The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.

~ Stephen King

there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.

~ Stephen Fry

Look!You want to see? See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like? Oh, you women are so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a good-looking fellow, eh?...When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me.She loves me forever! I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!...Look at me! I am Don Juan Triumphant! -Erik in The Phantom of the Opera

~ Gaston Leroux

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

You ask a lot of questions, don't you? My brother always says curiosity is my besetting sin.

~ Cassandra Clare

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

I tried to explain again. 'Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favourite song that you knew off by heart. It's like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a group who sang a famous song. It's something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there's an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can't rest until I know the answer.''I Understand,' he said softly.

~ Cecelia Ahern

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, Is this true? Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality? To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

~ Saul D. Alinsky

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

~ Bill Bryson

These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began-Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.

~ Rudyard Kipling

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

You will allow that one's curiosity must be aroused when one learns that a lady is prepared to elope to escape from advances one had not the least intention of making!

~ Georgette Heyer

Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Me and my insatiable curiosity. If there's any justice in the world, I was a very good cat in a past life.

~ Rhi Etzweiler

When you sneak into somebody’s backyard, it does seem that guts and curiosity are working together. Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own-with whatever guts you can muster.

~ Haruki Murakami

Eve and the apple was the first great step in experimental science.

~ James Bridie

He likes to know things. He checks out book and record collections when he visits people, looks in medicine cabinets, takes inventory in refrigerators. He eaves drops on conversations at public phone booths. He reads murder victims' mail.

~ John Sayles

No, by God, he had no intention of going on like a blind man, plodding down a path of brainless, fruitless existence until old age or accident took him. Either he found the answer or he ditched the whole mess, life included.

~ Richard Matheson

Being curious is the most important part of being a journalist. It might be the most important part of being anything.

~ Lemony Snicket

Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.

~ Samuel Beckett

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but paranoia was what tied it up in a sack and buried it in wet concrete.

~ Kate Griffin

The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably won’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.

~ Diane Ackerman

Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.

~ Kij Johnson

Mermon's tiny black dot eyes managed to widen into larger black dots. No, no, no, Sir. I was just... curious. Curiosity is a good thing, like onion soup. But too much onion soup makes you breath smell terrible. and too much curiosity can make your whole body smell terrible, if it causes you to be dead. Veenie nodded carefully; it was a strange threat, but a threat nonetheless.

~ Michael Reisman

Latchkey! I mean . . . I want to talk to you . . .' He fell silent, glancing behind him and shifting from foot to foot, his waterproof trousers rattling like the bulls' bladders that boys use to learn swimming. Sterlingov angrily spat out his cigarette. 'Well? What about?' 'A . . . about a secret matter ,' Alyoshka whispered. Dozens of ears floated around them in the dust waves; the whisper was heard, and it ran on like a spark along a gunpowder wick. Alyoshka's secret message, the mysterious special clothing, the deacon's catastrophe-all this was too much. The atmosphere was charged with thousands of volts, and something was needed to discharge the electricity, to clear the air. (X)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

There is a germ of revolt lying in the spirit of inquiry and critical curiosity.

~ André Gide

I told her, Bring your scriptures, Preach My Gospel, and every question you have. Questions are good. Let's see what the Lord will teach us together....During one of our study sessions together, as she threw a steady stream of questions at me, I asked her if she was asking questions against a backdrop of faith or one of doubt. In other words, are you saying, 'Here's something I don't understand, so the gospel must not be true.' or are you willing to say, 'Here's something I don't understand, but I wonder what the Lord or His prophets will teach us about this?'Are your questions asked with the assumption that there are answers? Are you will to trust the Lord and give Him the benefit of the doubt?

~ Sheri Dew

Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The nature of the mind is to acquire, to absorb, is it not? Or rather the pattern it has created for itself is one of gathering in, and in that very activity the mind is preparing its own weariness, boredom. Interst, curiosity, is the beginning of acquisition, wich soon becomes boredom; and the urge to be free from boredom is another form of possession. So the mind goes from boredom to interest to boredom again, til it is utterly weary; and these successive waves of interest and weariness are regarded as existence.Commentaries on Living, Series II

~ Jiddhu Krishnamurti

I’m curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don’t see with fixed attention, I don’t read with great care, and I don’t think with continuity. I’m an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I’m definable as a landscape of resignations.

~ Fernando Pessoa

I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.

~ Jon Ronson

Who now would thrust enquiry on / Beyond necessity of desire?

~ Geoffrey Hill

I want to say, Christina, that you are ... unusual. And somehow... her voice trails off. Your mind-- your curiosity-- will be your comfort.

~ Christina Baker Kline

Stop, stop pretty water!Said Mary one dayTo a frolicsome brookThat was running away.You run on so fast!I wish you would stay;My boat and my flowersYou will carry away.But I will run after:Mother says that I may;For I would know whereYou are running way.So Mary ran on;But I have heard say,That she never could findWhere the brook ran away.

~ Eliza Lee Follen

Curiosity is god’s greatest gift to man, but my gift is a little amplified.

~ Onaiza Khan

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

~ Dorothy Parker/Ellen Parr