Intellectual Curiosity Quotes

Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. ~ Hallam Stevens

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. ~ G. M. Trevelyan

That my most important values are honesty, empathy, and intellectual curiosity. That I'm unwilling to tolerate women who don't make me happy, no matter how hot they are. ~ Mark Manson

Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead. ~ Alan Lightman

I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder. ~ Hermann Hesse

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways. ~ Edith Wharton

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it. In ~ William Deresiewicz

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries. ~ Andrew Dalby

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities - a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity - but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies. ~ Steven Johnson

My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure. ~ Kevin Mitnick

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] 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 window. ~ Steven Pinker

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity? ~ Ronald Reagan

They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan's belt and slide his hand against skin. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience. ~ Oswald Chambers

Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning. ~ Gza

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

This was the end of the Renaissance. Culture, once beloved and fostered by the papacy, opened the way to dangerous freedom. Then - as now - knowledge, culture, intellectual curiosity became suspect, even dangerous to oppressive regimes: knowledge leading to engaging the mind into reasoning, culture into wanting to know more, intellectual curiosity sharpening the appetite for information, fact. Ignorance was considered safe and political oppression went hand in hand with the congregation of the Inquisition. ~ Gaia Servadio

One of the greatest product of a meaningful education is the intellectual curiosity that leads men and women to continued learning and makes them eager to learn as the experience of life reveals areas of ignorance. ~ M.A. Khan

I do have a peripatetic and active intellectual curiosity. ~ Guy Kawasaki

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries. ~ Gordon Gee

Given the power and influence that science increasingly has in our daily lives, it is important that we as citizens of an open and democratic society learn to separate good science from bunk. This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity, as it affects where large portions of our tax money go, and in some cases even whether people's lives are lost as a result of nonsense. ~ Massimo Pigliucci

My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history. ~ Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before, it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill, and now hacking is big business. ~ Kevin Mitnick

You're never going to learn something as profoundly as when it's purely out of curiosity ~ Christopher Nolan

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Speak for yourself,' said Danny Hislop. 'I'm held together by intellectual curiosity. So are we all. We were wonderfully specious at Novgorod - Best will remember - about our reasons for staying in Russia. No one gave the correct one. You can hate a man and stay in his company because of his sheer, God-given, irresistible powers to stimulate. We all liked fighting, and we liked talking about fighting. With Lymond you don't talk about fighting; you discuss the art of warfare, and then its philosophy, and then ten dozen other subjects all through the night, or for as long as he has patience to stay with you. I thought, God help me, that you were all trailing through Europe because you were enamoured of him. It wasn't that in the least.'

'We loved his mind,' said Adam Blacklock, with sudden terrible bitterness. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing, her real intellectual curiosity. ~ Caroline Kennedy

When you raise the camera to your eye you become responsible for contextualizing the history of the person you are photographing. It is critical that photographers take that responsibility as seriously as they do the photograph itself. Stories need to be approached with intellectual curiosity rather than a mere visual curiosity. It is also critical they consider the people they are photographing as collaborators, not "subjects. ~ Neeta Satam

Actually, I've never thought myself as being a particularly hard worker. I've always worked, and I guess my mind is busy all the time. I've been in a lot of things just because of my own intellectual curiosity. ~ Sam Wyly

My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. 'I think that kind of faith is so beautiful,' she whispers to me in the church, 'but I can't do it, I just can't ... ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning. ~ William Arthur Ward

Intellectual curiosity and the human brain are the root of science. ~ Eraldo Banovac

But it isn't true," Orville responded emphatically, "to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity. ~ David McCullough

The state of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity. ~ Ronald Reagan

If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician. ~ G.H. Hardy

With intellectual curiosity the world will always be full of magic and wonder. ~ Marjorie Pay Hinckley

A typical mathematician does not actively try to be useful. Individual mathematicians are motivated primarily by a subtle mixture of ambition and intellectual curiosity, and not by a wish to benefit society, nevertheless, mathematics as a whole does benefit society. ~ Timothy Gowers

Education was the most important value in our home when I was growing up. People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history. ~ Caroline Kennedy

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise ~ Alfred North Whitehead

He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence. ~ Amartya Sen

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you." That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is a childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an intense longing sometimes to turn to and do something real for once, to be seriously and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with nothing but esthetics and intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended, however, in resignation, in surrender to destiny. ~ Hermann Hesse

Watch for subjects as you go but the city or the country. Keep your eyes and ears open, and you will hear and see angels. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Naturally, I was a bit of a curiosity, being the first hydrogen peroxide ingestion patient they had ever seen. ~ Lara St. John

Pat answers to complex problems are the hallmark of intellectual mediocrity ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky

To answer brutality with brutality is to admit one's moral and intellectual bankruptcy. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Yoga is more than physical. It is cellular, mental, intellectual and spiritual-it involves man in his entire being ~ B.K.S. Iyengar

According to Buddhism, all existents abide in loving-kindness free from concepts in their absolute nature. But the understanding and realization of that true nature have been covered over by the webs of our own mental, emotional, and intellectual obscurations. Now, in order to uncover the true nature and its qualities, we must dispel the cover - our unhealthy concepts, emotions, and actions. Through the power of devotion and contemplation, we must uncover and see the true innate enlightened qualities - loving-kindness that is free from concepts - shining forever. ~ Tulku Thondup

Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture. ~ Nancy Kress

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it. ~ George Sand

To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm. ~ Carrie Brownstein

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to. ~ Richard Ford

Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity. ~ Honore De Balzac

I look upon youth in admiration and admire them for their curiosity about the world, their shape shifting, their ideas about the future. ~ Polixeni Papapetrou

Sports and entertainment are the only places where inner-city kids see themselves being able to succeed. Their intellectual development is something they don't relate to. ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The secret of success is an absolute ungovernable curiosity. ~ Larry King

We can put our whole heart into whatever we do; but if we freeze our attitude into for or against, we're setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we could just go forward with curiosity, wondering where this experiment will lead. This kind of open-ended inquisitiveness captures the spirit of enthusiasm, or heroic perseverance. ~ Pema Chodron

Let me by the child in that story and declare that the Emperor is naked-or that America is culturally bankrupt. ~ Ayn Rand

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre. ~ Harold Pinter

My guess is that you would find that the intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector [of society], for good reasons. It's their role as a secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense that they put forth. Other people can repeat it, but it's not that crucial that they really believe it. But for the intellectual elite themselves, it's crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for a very rare person who's an outright liar, it's hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you've internalized it and come to believe it. ~ Noam Chomsky

Optimal sculpting of key neural networks through healthy early relationships allows us to think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in moment-to-moment ~ Louis Cozolino

I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. ~ Edward Snowden

Yeah, yeah, success is a ladder, a marathon instead of a sprint and all that crap. Everyone can TELL you stuff like that, but you really have to understand advice in relation to YOURSELF, or it's all just nice intellectual theory. ~ Felicia Day

He moved on from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though not to Rousseau. Perhaps this was because one side of him - the side easily moved by passion - was too close to Rousseau. Instead, he approached the author of 'Candide', who was closer to another side of him - the cool and richly intellectual side.
At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun - as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

On the American desert are horses which eat the locoweed and some are driven made by it; their vision is affected, they take enormous leaps to cross a tuft of grass or tumble blindly into rivers. The horses which have become thus addicted are shunned by the others and will never rejoin the herd. So it is with human beings: those who are conscious of another world, the world of the spirit, acquire an outlook which distorts the values of ordinary life; they are consumed by the weed of non-attachment. Curiosity is their one excess and therefore they are recognized not by what they do, but by what they refrain from doing, like those Araphants or disciples of Buddha who are pledged to the "Nine Incapabilities." Thus they do not take life, they do not compete, they do not boast, they do not join groups of more than six, they do not condemn others; they are "abandoners of revels, mute, contemplative" who are depressed by gossip, gaiety and equals, who wait to be telephoned to, who neither speak in public, nor keep up with their friends, nor take revenge upon their enemies. Self-knowledge has taught them to abandon hate and blame and envy in their lives, and they look sadder than they are. They seldom make positive assertions because they see, outlined against any statement, as a painter sees a complementary color, the image of its opposite. Most psychological questionnaires are designed to search out these moonlings and to secure their non-employment. They divine each other by a war ~ Cyril Connelly

The game of chess is the most fascinating and intellectual pastime which the wisdom of antiquity has bequeathed to us. ~ Howard Staunton

me, though he had business relations with me many years ago, and we are now intimate; I will say with the fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly attached, and who is so devotedly attached to him? Believe me, Miss Pross, I don't approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of zealous interest." "Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad's the best, you'll tell me," said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, "he is afraid of the whole subject. ~ Charles Dickens

One can … get trapped in one's own intellectual web. ~ Elinor Ostrom

Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content. ~ Noam Chomsky

What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow. ~ Norton Juster

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

It is hard to think of conversion as a blinding light on the road to Damascus, or as a highly spiritual or intellectual process, when the light comes from a flickering television; the voice of the deity is Bishop Sheen and you have drilled your father on his catechism answers ... I was troubled at a young age by the idea that pouring water over someone's head could change both his relationship to God ... ~ Susan Jacoby

The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. ~ Sam Harris

She had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never inquired about one another's business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet. ~ Terry Pratchett

I wasn't born smart, I was born curious. ~ John Handley

But I think it's useful to note that at any particular point in our lives our minds are full not just of our own memories but of the experiences of characters from the books we've been reading. That's if we are lucky to have the education and leisure to read at all. And the curiosity ~ Joanna Scott

Am I corrupted by my hungry curiosity, as Aleksi says? ~ Sarah Fine

My uncle said physically disciplining children fell into the same category as hitting an animal, neither has the emotional or intellectual capacity to understand the action on any level other than pain and fear. He said discipline is a concept that can only be understood by adults. ~ Fabian Black

Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings. ~ Al-Ghazali

beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. ~ Oscar Wilde

Peace is not a product of an intellectual exercise. It is an inner blossoming that occurs with meditation. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi