#curiosity

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#sacrifice #samaritan #science #men

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out. ↗

— B.F. Skinner

#curiosity #motivation #motivational

We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#knowledge #margaret-atwood #snooping #the-blind-assassin #love

Curiosity is the engine of achievement. ↗

— Ken Robinson

#motivation #psychology #motivational

It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#common-sense #curiosity #deadly-sins #faults #gold

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

— James Bridie

#science #science

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 would be curiosity. ↗

— Eleanor Roosevelt

#birth

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#learning #scholarship #learn

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times. ↗

— Bernard Beckett

#curiosity #fear #fragile #optimism #spirit

The knowledge of all things is possible ↗

— Leonardo da Vinci

#curiosity #knowledge #learning #knowledge