#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

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

— James Bridie

#science #science

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

— Richard P. Feynman

#learning #scholarship #learn

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

#crocodile #curiosity #greed #kite #greed

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment. ↗

— David Attenborough

#fulfillment #great #natural #natural world #only

In a house where there are small children the bathroom soon takes on the appearance of the Old Curiosity Shop. ↗

— Robert Benchley

#bathroom #children #curiosity #house #old

The curiosity to see the prisoners appears to be unabated. ↗

— Lewis Tappan

#curiosity #prisoners #see

Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts. ↗

— Clarence Day

#curiosity #enjoy #facts #far #mainspring

Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications. ↗

— Hermann von Helmholtz

#arouse #astonishment #curiosity #each #fact