Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

Anything that I read, I read because I'm interested in it.

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone's orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone's opinions, threats, wishes, plans.

Free curiosity is of more value in learning than harsh discipline.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

Curiosity is a delicate little plant that, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.

Go anywhere you wish, talk to everyone. Ask any questions; you will be given answers. When you want to learn, you will be taught. Use the library. Open any book.

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.

Wonder... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.

You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

The more I read, the hungrier I become. Each book seemed promising, each page I turned offered an escapade, the allure of another world, other destinies, other dreams.

No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told it is to the one to whom it is told another fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.