Brian Aldiss Quotes

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the Internet. But we're still very animalistic.

Everyone is a bit nosey. It's like if you walk down the street and someone has their blinds open, you look in.

We're all curious about a lot of things.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species.

One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.

Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.

Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.

We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.

Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.

The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

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.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.

Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.

Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has.

One of the hallmarks of the team is this sense of looking to be wrong. It's the inquisitiveness, and sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong, because then you've discovered something new.