Cultural Curiosity Quotes

As a boy, I used to look upon the hieroglyphics as so many wonderful pictures.

I have always been intrigued by other cultures, and traveling to foreign lands has always been a part of my personal passion for learning about our world.

I'm certainly curious about people. As a kid, I moved around a lot. I was raised in a lot of different places, and thanks to working in the movies, I've gotten to keep traveling. I've always been interested in other cultures and languages.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.

One of my fondest memories from childhood is of looking at a globe with my father. "What's the biggest country?" he'd ask me and my sister. We'd spin the globe around and guess. . . . The globe brought me a sense of wonder and adventure. I wanted to go to those other places and see how people did things differently. And, many years later, when I did visit other countries, I took my father's interest and fascination with me. When we plant the seeds of fascination and respect for other people, we are teaching tolerance and peace.

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.

My understanding of Chinese history is limited. So far, I have only scratched its surface; I wish I could find out more.

An English man does not travel to see English men.

Since I don't feel like I belong solely to any one of them I find that it makes me even more interested and open to other cultures as well. It's also fun looking ethnically ambiguous because no one can quite put a finger on what I am and it's very entertaining to me!

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

In Soviet times, the border was closed, so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.

It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say.

There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation, but I was very curious about the music of others.

Be interested in everything. You don't have to adore it. I don't adore hip-hop, I don't think it's great music, but I'm interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I'm interested - you gotta stay interested!

Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?

[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.

In college, my wife did a study abroad in Nairobi, and I did the exact same program in Cape Town. For me, the experience of being in that other culture really set up a longing. When I'm traveling, things seem really sharp. You learn things ten times faster.

It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it.

Indians are very curious and like to see and feel all who are placed near them. They remain as yet very quiet and those who come to visit bring furs and venison. I am, as you know, a novice in Indian affairs.

In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.