Inspirational Quotes on Curiosity

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”

“The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”

“Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.”

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”

“but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.”

“If we are to use the words ‘childish’ and ‘infantile’ as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?”

“It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.”

“The shiny paint laid on by curiosity's hand has worn off. What thing better can a man know than the love of Christ, which passes knowledge?”

“This disease of curiosity.”

“Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.”

“No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.”

“But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up.”

“A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.”

“Study cannot happen until we are subject to the subject.”

“If we watch the interactions between human beings, we will receive a graduate-level education.”

“Be interested yourself, and you will interest others.”

“We may rifle the treasures of antiquity and make the heathen contribute to the gospel even as Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direction for the building of the Temple.”

“Nevertheless, there are many respects, in tiny and contemptible matters, where our curiosity is provoked every day. How often do we slip, who can count? How many times we initially act as if we put up with people telling idle tales in order not to offend the weak, but then gradually we find pleasure in listening. I now do not watch a dog chase a rabbit when this is happening at the circus. But if by chance I am passing when coursing occurs in the countryside, it distracts me perhaps indeed from thinking out some weighty matter. The hunt turns me to an interest in the sport, not enough to lead me to alter the direction of the beast I am riding, but shifting the inclination of my heart. Unless you had proved to me my infirmity and quickly admonished me either to take the sight as the start for some reflection enabling me to rise up to you or wholly to scorn and pass the matter by, I would be watching like an empty-headed fool. When I am sitting at home, a lizard catching flies or a spider entrapping them as they rush into its web often fascinates me. The problem is not made any different by the fact that the animals are small. The sight leads me on to praise you, the marvellous Creator and orderer of all things; but that was not how my attention first began. It is one thing to rise rapidly, another thing not to fall.”

“The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads.”

“Lewis created a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination.”