Curiosity Quotes - Page 8

Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void that ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four he was expounding such inquiries as: ‘Why do squares have more sides than triangles?’‘How will we see when the sun goes dark?’‘Do flowers grow under the ocean?’‘Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?

The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.

I've grown more OK with mystery as I've gotten older.

My hope and intent is to provide a wide range of resources and ideas that provoke real questions and considerations under the surface of common dialogue. With a definite thrust toward clues for moving beyond limiting patterns that restrict our personal and communal evolution and experience of, as well as effectiveness in, life. Part of that is about giving different angles of insight into the why and how of developing skills, whatever they may be. I think the larger discussion, or maybe the more relevant one surrounding skills development, involves what quality of fuel is being used to run the skill. Inevitably, and very quickly, this enters into considerations of how much of oneself one brings to the show. For example, anyone can learn a sophisticated skill in an extremely short period of time, once they’re completely convinced of the need, benefit and value of doing so and find enough full-bodied conviction to engage it accordingly (“You never hear anyone practicing a language; they simply listen and then begin to speak.” — Wade Davis).

Science is about our passionate conviction that we are placed within a universe that is not simply the result of our imaginings, and our longing and determination to understand it. Ultimately, science is about reality, truth and freedom.

Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

My body is tired as worn out rug, but my brain (if i had) is always full of curiosity, jumping around for seeking new funs. If they could learn how to be cooperative each others, my life could be way easier... sigh*

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?

Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.

It may seem an easy task to disregard a secret but secrets are like splinters beneath the flesh, the infection spreads and spreads and then the limb turns gangrenous and must be sawn away, all for the sake of a sliver of wood.

Yesterday I watched a curious nightfall. The cloud ceiling took on a warm tone, deepened, and departed as if drawn on a leash. I could no longer see the fat snow flying against the sky; I could see it only as it fell before dark objects. Any object at a distance –like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I see from the bay window- looked like a black and white frontispiece seen through a sheet of white tissue. It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed. The snow on the yard was blue as ink, faintly luminous; the sky violet. The bay window betrayed me, and started giving me back the room’s lamps. It was like dying, that growing dimmer and deeper and then going out.

I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.

Now, if you open the treasure chest of desire, what do you find there? What do all the desires have in common? You. Go ahead and stop here and test it for a few days if you are really serious about the question. After you get past the first thousand, you begin to enter into a subtle territory, known as the border between desire and yearning. Or, if you want, between answers and questions. The defining quality, or essence, of desire is that it is engaged as if it were an answer.

My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.

There’s a long tradition in many disciplines regarding the breath, so I’m certainly not the first to suggest its importance. Unfortunately, though, having so much tradition, that gives the sense to many that there’s nothing really new there, nothing extraordinary to discover. The traditions themselves in most cases haven’t really evolved and haven’t succeeded in compelling the general public. Everyone knows to “take a deep breath” when stressed, but the immediate impact is minimal at best (actually, a deep breath is not much help; a long, smooth, slow exhale is, however). And the idea of another obligation, studying or relearning how to breathe, lacks inspiration.

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?

In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.

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.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.

Curiosity leads to knowledge.Knowledge leads to understanding.Understanding leads to love.Love leads to harmony.Be curious.

If there’s one thing all diviners share, it’s curiosity. We really can’t help it; it’s just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, ‘Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then’, you’d get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in.Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us.

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

These five values are the organic origins of what could be called intuitive conscience. They are also what we experience personally as our core, essential yearnings, however distorted or confused we may interpret them: to care and be cared for; to share equally in freedom and responsibility; to belong, and to trust that what we belong to will continue; that there exists an objective hierarchy of virtue and wisdom; that there exists that which is unquestionably sacred or divine.

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.

What’s the old saying? Ah, I remember now. ‘Curiosity flayed the cat alive, ripped it apart limb from limb, and listened to it scream before it killed it.’ That’s the one.

There are so many stereotypes, prepackaged concepts and platitudes out there in our thinking on the divine, and the associated emotions those produce; it’s very difficult to transcend. But that’s ultimately what experiencing the divine is all about: transcending stereotypes, concepts and platitudes. As soon as one falls back on an acceptable definition or understanding, it disappears. It’s like water; the moment you try to grasp it, you lose it.

At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.

We all understand the value of sacrifice, even if that only involves setting aside dessert so as to lose weight, or putting money in the bank so as to later buy a house. Progress or achievement in any arena requires choices that often oppose what one feels like doing. The trick in truly succeeding with this in the long run is locating enough depth of feeling that the experience of conflicting desires dissolves. For that to happen, one has to learn how to think emotionally and physiologically.

Henry Adams observes that John Hay has the ability to take the world as a whole rather than pulling it to pieces in criticism. He also observes that, in the routine of a stressful job, this perspective is challenged

The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change.

The writer as boxer says he develops by, "learning from everyone who'll spar with me.

My favorite words in the world are t

Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass. More perplexing than that, who on earth could convince them otherwise ?

One of the peculiar children's perspective out of time allows him to take minute interest in every resident of the town and to chronicle everything we did for the entire day he lives over and over.

Curiosity is called curiosity because of how curiously it can creep into people’s behavior no matter what dangers are around.

A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn't know.

If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.

Remember that things are not always as they appear to be… Curiosity creates possibilities and opportunities.

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

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.

Empathy is a special application of the imagination. The ability to imagine what it would be like to experience what someone else is experiencing can be crucial to moral sensitivity.

His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.

Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Nature answers every question.

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

My continuing passion is to explore strange industries, to acquire new knowledge and ask many questions, to boldly learn something I did not know before.

Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 talk on educational reform—entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.

Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.

Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.

When we aren't curious in conversations we judge, tell, blame and even shame, often without even knowing it, which leads to conflict.

Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. . . . This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can't embrace error—the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder.

The inquisitive nature of youth should carry over into our adult lives. Challenging the status quo and enticing curiosity should be a daily practice of adult life.

Virtually everyone defines their identity—or constructs their belief of who they are—through their specific combination of desires and suffering. Or, desires obtained (apparent subjective success at the sacrifice of something else), desires unobtained (suffering), and desires still left as questions (to be obtained or not). And...most of the desires, and the suffering, are themselves by-products of others, established by society and the rules of each sect of society.

Science is a satisfactory curiosity.

Ten minutes later, I chance a second look. They say curiosity killed the cat. I wonder what that cat was looking at, and was it as interesting as this?