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Curiosity

  • There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.

  • I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has.

  • Curiosity is the only thing that really carries through time, isn't it? The creative curiosity, I mean, which fights its way into expression?

  • Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

    • Freya Stark,
    • 1940, in Caroline Moorehead, ed., Over the Rim of the World: Freya Stark Selected Letters ()
  • ... curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

  • Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it.

  • I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

  • There is no experience from which you can't learn something ... And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience for the adventure of life.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: 1884-1932, vol. 1 ()
  • Curiosity is its own suicide ...

  • There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger.

  • Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

  • Some men and women are inquisitive about everything, they are always asking, if they see any one with anything they ask what is that thing, what is it you are carrying, what are you going to be doing with that thing, why have you that thing, where did you get that thing, how long will you have that thing, there are very many men and women who want to know about anything about everything.

  • Curiosity is my natural state and has led me headlong into every worthwhile experience (never mind the others) I have ever had.

    • Alice Walker,
    • "One Child of One's Own," In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens ()
  • All my adult life, an insatiable curiosity has propelled me toward the next home, the next job, the next trip. It's as though, when I was born, some cosmic joke flung bits of me around the planet, and I've been on a lifelong scavenger hunt to find those parts of my psyche that lie outside this sack of flesh and bones.

  • ... if you think you know, you don't ask questions, or if you ask, you don't listen to the answers. Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You — you have to grope.

  • Curiosity is the prime requisite of the novelist.

  • Curiosity has a spiteful way of turning back on the curious.

  • All children are curious, I think, but not all adults are.

  • My curiosity is not a choice. It's always been part of me. I think of it as a vital organ.

  • The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home ...

  • It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

    • Margaret Atwood,
    • in Earl G. Ingersoll, ed., Margaret Atwood: Conversations ()
  • Inquisitive people aren't really very attractive, are they?

  • Curiosity ran unchecked through him, like the wind outside through the deserted streets, along the canal, around the little wooden houses, everywhere, as far as the mountain.

  • It had become a passion with him to satisfy his curiosity, the only impulse he did not try to master, probably because it seemed to be the basis of all self-cultivation.

  • I shall continue to explore — the astonishment of living!

  • Her curiosity instructed her more than the answers she was given.

  • I have only one curiosity left: death.

    • Coco Chanel,
    • in Marcel Haedrich, Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets ()
  • ... the thing I would wish for anybody I loved would be the possibility of never coming to the end of discovery. I think it is what makes life worth living.

    • Joyce Grenfell,
    • "Sonnet" (1940), in Reggie Grenfell and Richard Garnett, eds., Joyce By Herself and Her Friends ()
  • Why — why — why! ... Ask it of everything your mind touches, and let your mind touch everything!

  • ... I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.

  • It doesn't do to be curious at Jamaica Inn, and I'll have you remember that.

  • Don't bring prejudices to other people's houses. Your worst enemy must be treated with special courtesy when you meet him or her at dinner. It will be all the more fun to cut him the next day.

  • Curiosity is one of those insatiable passions that grow by gratification ...

  • ... the children ... scattered in every direction, crying as they ran on, only to creep back after a moment drawn by that prurient curiosity which is the one natural tie left between the buzzard and man.

  • ... he was overwhelmingly curious. He had a mind like a child's, or a puppy's, or an old-fashioned novelist's, prying into everything and weaving stories around whatever caught his attention.

  • When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists — nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.

  • Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

  • Curiosity and courtesy are very often at variance.

  • Curiosity is the hunger of the human mind.

    • Rose Wilder Lane,
    • 1928, in William Holtz, ed., Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship ()
  • Curiosity is the other side of caution.

  • There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts, we long to know about them.