250 books
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3,785 voters
Jignesh Darji
https://www.goodreads.com/jigneshdarji91
“Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, ‘Why is there good and evil?’ ‘How does nature work?’ ‘Why am I me?’ If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years’ War.”
― The Art of Travel
― The Art of Travel
“(Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.)”
― Shoe Dog
― Shoe Dog
“For Humboldt, the question had been, ‘Why are there regional variations in nature?’ For the person standing before the Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, the question might be, ‘Why have people felt the need to build churches?’ or even ‘Why do we worship God?’ From such a naive starting point, a chain of curiosity would have the chance to grow, involving questions such as ‘Why are churches different in different places?’, ‘What have been the main styles of churches?’ and ‘Who were the main architects, and why did they achieve success?’ Only through such a slow evolution of curiosity could a traveller stand a chance of greeting the news that the church’s vast neoclassical facade was by Sabatini with anything other than boredom or despair.”
― The Art of Travel
― The Art of Travel
“One of Wordsworth’s poetic ambitions was to induce us to see the many animals living alongside us that we typically ignore, registering them only out of the corner of our eyes and feeling no appreciation for what they are up to and want: shadowy, generic presences such as the bird up on the steeple and the rustling creature in the bush. He invited his readers to abandon their usual perspectives and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.”
― The Art of Travel
― The Art of Travel
Jignesh’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jignesh’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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