Academic Curiosity Quotes

Today in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.

I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge, and then I got introduced to Fred Sanger. I was very conscientious, and I asked him when I first got there if I should start reading up on things. But he said, 'No, I think you can just start these experiments,' so I plunged right in.

When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem.

I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

When I was In high school, I became interested in Greek mythology. I had to know all about the exact dates of all the history.

You’ve never been to school, ever? If that’s true— and you’re right, I don’t think it is—what made you decide to come this year?” “You....Your eyes, Nora. Those cold, pale gray eyes are surprisingly irresistible.” He tipped his head sideways, as if to study me from a new angle. “And that killer curvy mouth

At age eleven, I became a member of the circulating library of my home town. From there on I was rarely seen outside but was reading two to four books per week, the subjects ranging from archaeology over ethnology and geography to zoology. Needless to say that I did not do much homework.

I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.

Scholars dream of finding small facts pregnant with great progeny.

I love to learn; I really do. We'd study something in class, and I'd take it outside of class and become, like, obsessive and just research everything.

I think fondly of the rabbit holes I disappeared down when I researched papers for history and English because I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, or because I had to go through so much material to find examples for my thesis.

I wasn't a great student, but I was interested in this theater thing, and I could spend hours in the library researching why the cuffs in the 18th century had four buttons. It was my handle.

I've always had a passion for geography. Even at a very young age.

I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

When I entered graduate school I had carried out the instructions given to me by my father and had knocked on both Murray Gell-Mann's and Feynman's doors and asked them what they were currently doing. Murray wrote down the partition function for the three-dimensional Ising model and said it would be nice if I could solve it (at least that is how I remember the conversation). Feynman's answer was 'nothing'.

My father claimed I could read before I went to school. I sucked up knowledge and read the Children's Britannica Encyclopaedia from cover to cover when I was eight.

I remember that already as a child I was often intensely interested in things, obsessed by ideas and projects in many areas, and in these topics I learned much on my own, reading books.

Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channelling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.

For whatever reason, you gravitate to certain subjects, and I read a lot of history.