Tom Mcdermott > Tom's Quotes

“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Rambler

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch

“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
― Walt Disney Company

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
― William Arthur Ward

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

“It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”
― Walt Disney

“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

“Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies

“So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“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, Genesis

“there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“It's daring to be curious about the unknown, to dream big dreams, to live outside prescribed boxes, to take risks, and above all, daring to investigate the way we live until we discover the deepest treasured purpose of why we are here.”
― Luci Swindoll, I Married Adventure: Looking at Life Through the Lens of Possibility

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

“There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“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

“Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.”
― Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.”
― Leo Rosten

“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. ”
― Arnold Edinborough

“Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.”
― Michael J Fox

“Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It's a good sign but rare instance when, in a relationship, you find that the more you learn about the other person, the more you continue to desire them. A sturdy bond delights in that degree of youthful intrigue. Love loves its youth.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.”
― René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind

“Those with less curiosity or ambition just mumble that God works in mysterious ways. I intend to catch him in the act.”
― Damien Echols, Life After Death

“Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”
― Albert Einstein