Dean Kamen Quotes

My motivation is to get a deeper understanding and exploration of something that I want to know about the human condition. So, that's what I look for in the material I read: if it's asking a genuine question about a concept of the world that interests me. And also, it helps if it's a context that I find interesting.

To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

You never know yourself till you know more than your body.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Since I was a child, I started to ask very difficult questions; even my family was telling me all the time, 'You're a very difficult person, and we were having trouble answering your questions. Why are you asking so many questions?'

The older I get, the more my curiosity grows, and every book I write is a new exploration.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

I want to see what I look like when I'm old - I'm curious where that's going to take me.

I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.

I've lived a fast-paced life, but I had the best childhood. I didn't miss out on anything by having my daughter at a young age.

I was one of those kids who was always seeking the truth, and I first looked for truth by reading novels. It took quite a long time for me to realize there are better ways.

I've done a lot of growing up since the age of 16 and I really wanted that to be reflected in my music.

Knowledge is the parent of knowledge. He who possesses most of the information of his age will not quietly submit to neglect its current acquisitions, but will go on improving as long as means and opportunities offer; while he who finds himself ignorant of most things, is only too apt to shrink from a labour which becomes Herculean.

From early childhood, I was interested in understanding how the world worked, and assumed I would be some kind of physical scientist or chemist. But the truth was, I didn't know there was another kind of world, the inner world, that was just as interesting, if not more relevant, than what was going on in the outside world.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

There is no such thing as an unreasonable question, or a silly question, or a frivolous question, or a waste-of-time question. It's your life, and you've got to get these answers.

I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

In our development, as we grow throughout our lives, the structure of our beliefs becomes very complicated, and we make it even more complicated because we make the assumption that what we believe is the absolute truth.

The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.