#curiosity

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

— Anatole France

#teaching #art

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. ↗

— Mortimer J. Adler

#children #curiosity #knowledge #intelligence

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity. ↗

— Aaron Swartz

#curiosity #reading #intelligence

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

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them. ↗

— Russell Baker

#before #children #curiosity #finally #know

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

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences. ↗

— Ian Hacking

#between #curiosity #extraordinary #human #human world