Christopher Paolini Quotes

I really like knowing secrets, and once I do know that secret, I can keep it. But if I'm on the outside and I don't know the secret, that's a different story. I will try with all my power to get the secret out of the person who knows.

What drove me and kept me going over the decades? If I had to use a single word, it would be 'curiosity.'

I'm quite a curious person. I don't mind being the one who doesn't know things, a role I often play in QI.

No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.

There are various sorts of curiosity; one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us; and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.

I think there's a difference between ditzy and dumb. Dumb is just not knowing. Ditzy is having the courage to ask!

If you are curious, you'll find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

You need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time.

We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.

I said I 'liked' being half-educated; you were so much more 'surprised' at everything when you were ignorant.

Sticking to it is the genius.

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

So far Kat has been through all the Wa's she could think of, but Hale hadn't admitted to being Walter or Ward or Washington. He'd firmly denied both Warren and Waverly. Watson had prompted him to do a very bad Sherlock Holmes impersonation throughout a good portion of a train ride to Edinburgh, Scotland. And Wayne seemed so wrong she hadn't even tried. Hale was Hale. And not knowing what the W's stood for had become a constant reminder to Kat that, in life, there are some things that can be given but never stolen. Of course, that didn't stop her from trying.

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.

Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.

Some things it don't pay to be curious about.

If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.

Wonder [admiratio astonishment, marvel] is a kind of desire for knowledge. The situation arises when one sees an effect and does not know its cause, or when the cause of the particular effect is one that exceeds his power of understanding. Hence, wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is annexed the hope of attaining understanding of that which one wants to know. ... For desire is especially aroused by the awareness of ignorance, and consequently a man takes the greatest pleasure in those things which he discovers for himself or learns from the ground up.

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

I am not more gifted than anybody else. I am just more curious than the average person and I will not give up a problem until I have found the proper solution.

I'm just very interested in what my guests have to say. You have to be vigilant to stay ignorant.

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.

Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.