curiosity Quotes

“Curiosity is not a sin.... But we should exercise caution with our curiosity... yes, indeed.”

“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

“What it said was something like this—at least this is the sense of it though the poetry, when you read it there, was better: Make your choice, adventurous Stranger; Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had. ‘No fear!’ said Polly. ‘We don’t want any danger.’ ‘Oh but don’t you see it’s no good!’ said Digory. ‘We can’t get out of it now. We shall always be wondering what else would have happened if we had struck the bell. I’m not going home to be driven mad by always thinking of that. No fear!‘”

“We don’t want to betray anyone - we don’t want to be the first to get curious and ask questions or challenge the stories. We ask ourselves, How can I love and protect my family if I’m rumbling with these hard truths? For me, the answer to that question is another question: How can I love and protect my family if I’m not rumbling with these hard truths?”

“Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure...”

“It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it. ”

“It was Silver’s voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

There are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.

“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”

Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?

“Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts’ place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn’t have traded places with the astronauts for all of the gold in Fort Knox. The men existed all alone out their in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. But given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.”

“She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.”

There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

“Lucy felt very frightened, but she felt inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out. (She had, of course, left the door open, for she knew that it is a very silly thing to shut oneself into a wardrobe.) It seemed to be still daylight there. “I can always get back if anything goes wrong,” thought Lucy.”

″‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. ‘I wonder is that more moth balls?’ she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hands. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. ‘This is very queer,’ she said, and went on a step or two further.”

“We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity.”

“Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through”

“The women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”

“Before Laura finished talking, I had already decided that I would take her workshop. She said she would teach us how to tell our stories in a more compelling way. I was curious to find out how this white woman, born in New York City, had become a storyteller.”

“This is their home. I have tried to make it as fine a place as I could. But the plain fact is they cannot leave, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make them want to.”

“But what she noticed first was a bright red wooden tray with a number of rings on it. They were in pairs - a yellow one and a green one together, than a little space, and then another yellow one and another green one. They were no bigger than ordinary rings, and no one could help noticing them because they were so bright.”

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.“

“A part of her wanted to study Mia ...to understand why...she did what she did.”

“The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool. College examinations notwithstanding, it takes a very smart fella to say ‘I don’t know the answer!‘”

“BRADY. The Bible satisfies me, it is enough. DRUMMOND. It frightens me to imagine the state of learning in this world if everyone had your driving curiosity.”

″‘Curiosity,‘said the mayor. ‘A dangerous quality. Unhealthy. Especially regrettable in one so young.‘”

“They get so curious. It’s like they have this idea of me, and whenever I step outside of that, it blows their minds. There’s something so embarrassing about that in a way I can’t even describe.”

“My mother educates me. We believe that schools inhibit the natural curiosity, creativity, and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be opened out into the world, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom.”

“That Misty ‘minds me of a girl gettin’ beautified for her first dance! Never was a colt more curious!”

“It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.”

“Many curious sights and happenings they saw in this wandering life; but they all seemed quite ordinary after the great things they had seen and done in foreign lands.″

“If this is the stone age and mum says the ice age is coming any minute now...how long is an age?”

“Zis is cozy, Dodo thought, settling in. Vince was watching her from his window. What the heck is she doing? he wondered.”

“We’d better hide our treasure before we reach the abbey. The abbot is sure to be curious about the contents of the bag and ill probably find his way inside it.”

“Time...why is it time? What is time, dad?”

“Mindfulness not only makes it possible to survey our internal landscape with compassion and curiosity but can also actively steer us in the right direction for self-care.”

“Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”

“Scientific thinking favors humility over pride, doubt over certainty, curiosity over closure.”

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere . . . in the heart of that gray city.”

“He feared his father’s anger more than anything else. But his desire to enter the shed was so great it drove his fear into the back of his mind, where it gnawed on him like a mouse in a wall.”

“It was the most curious shop they had ever been in! Fancy keeping all those queer things in boxes! Really, there must be magic about somewhere.”

“He tilted his head and watched me, unspeaking. He didn’t need to point out that both times I’d visited this town, I’d come without a mother.”

“How can we be so different and feel so much alike?”

“It’s—I wondered—It’s only—Rabbit, I suppose you don’t know, What does the North Pole look like?” “Well,” said Rabbit, stroking his whiskers. “Now you’re asking me.” “I did know once, only I’ve sort of forgotten,” said Christopher Robin carelessly. “It’s a funny thing,” said Rabbit, “but I’ve sort of forgotten too, although I did know once.” “I suppose it’s just a pole stuck in the ground?” “Sure to be a pole,” said Rabbit, “because of calling it a pole, and if it’s a pole, well, I should think it would be sticking in the ground, shouldn’t you, because there’d be nowhere else to stick it.”

Well, he was humming this hum to himself, and walking along gaily, wondering what everybody else was doing, and what it felt like, being somebody else, when suddenly he came to a sandy bank, and in the bank was a large hole.

“We’re going to discover the North Pole.” “Oh!” said Pooh again. “What is the North Pole?” he asked. “It’s just a thing you discover,” said Christopher Robin carelessly, not being quite sure himself.

It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he saw was Tigger, sitting in front of the glass and looking at himself. “Hallo!” said Pooh. “Hallo!” said Tigger. “I’ve found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them.”

Antony couldn’t help feeling a thrill of excitement as he followed Cayley’s example, and put his face close up to the glass. For the first time he wondered if there really had been a revolver shot in this mysterious room. It had all seemed so absurd and melodramatic from the other side of the door.

“I was only about twelve at the time. The sort of age when you’re told not to ask questions.”

“That’s the question,” said Antony to himself, as he filled his pipe, “and bless me if I know the answer.

The library was worth going into, passages or no passages. Antony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

Antony was thinking of Miss Norbury’s feelings as a daughter, and wondering if she guessed that her affairs were now being discussed with a stranger. Yet what could he do? What, indeed, did he want to do except listen, in the hope of learning?

She said we could ask her any question we liked and I asked ever so many. I’m good at asking questions, Marilla.

Aha! see now, how they trouble the brain,—these books!—these books!

Demi, like a true Yankee, was of an inquiring turn, wanting to know everything, and often getting much disturbed because he could not get satisfactory answers to his perpetual “What for?”

Monte Cristo noticed, as they descended the staircase, that Bertuccio signed himself in the Corsican manner; that is, had formed the sign of the cross in the air with his thumb, and as he seated himself in the carriage, muttered a short prayer. Anyone but a man of exhaustless thirst for knowledge would have had pity on seeing the steward’s extraordinary repugnance for the count’s projected drive without the walls; but the count was too curious to let Bertuccio off from this little journey.

Thomson & French, the Roman bankers, have sent to me a certain person calling himself the Count of Monte Cristo, and have given him an unlimited credit with me. I confess this is the drollest thing I have ever met with in the course of my extensive foreign transactions, and you may readily suppose it has greatly roused my curiosity. I took the trouble this morning to call on the pretended count—if he were a real count he wouldn’t be so rich. But, would you believe it, ‘He was not receiving.’ So the master of Monte Cristo gives himself airs befitting a great millionaire or a capricious beauty.

“What is he going to do?” thought Villefort, whose position demanded much reserve, but who was longing to know what his father’s intentions were.

The Parisians, always curious, always affected by funereal display, looked on with religious silence while the splendid procession accompanied to their last abode two of the number of the old aristocracy—the greatest protectors of commerce and sincere devotees to their principles.

He really did want to open the door, really did want to let them see him and to speak with the chief clerk; the others were being so insistent, and he was curious to learn what they would say when they caught sight of him. If they were shocked then it would no longer be Gregor’s responsibility and he could rest. If, however, they took everything calmly he would still have no reason to be upset, and if he hurried he really could be at the station for eight o’clock.

As I lounged in the park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at every one who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led.

“There are more things to find out about in this house,” he said to himself, “than all my family could find out in all their lives. I shall certainly stay and find out.”

“What I want to know,” said the young mule, who had been quiet for a long time—“what I want to know is, why we have to fight at all.”

When darkness at length overtook me, I went to bed in great anxiety, fearing to pass over the object of so much curiosity when I should have no opportunity of observing it.

Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out to be a human skull.”