Inquisitive Nature Quotes

Never lose a holy curiosity.

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

Good science is done by being curious in general, by asking questions all around, by acknowledging the likelihood of being wrong and taking this in good humor for granted, by having a deep fondness for nature, and by being made jumpy and nervous by ignorance.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

At a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.

I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

Dad always explained the car engine when he repaired it, and he had many technical books, so I was making electromagnets by age eight as well as reading my mother's medical and nursing books. I suspect I was born with a boundless curiosity, and this was encouraged through my childhood.

I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

That was cool, getting to work with Ryan Gosling. I knew he was going to be a huge star after I saw him in that Showtime thing that he did when he was really young [The Believer]. I think the most fun thing about that was I'd never seen somebody that had so many questions about the specifics of everything: where you ate, how much you ate, how much you drank. He's very special.

I had two brilliant children and one genius. Elon could figure out things when he was very young and was always advanced for his age. He could hold a conversation about something that was way beyond his years, and he read voraciously.

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.

Even when I was older, I couldn't stop asking questions.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Man by Nature desires to know.

The critical spirit never knows when to stop meddling.

Inquiry is human; blind obedience brutal. Truth never loses by the one but often suffers by the other.

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he - she - is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science.

I love to doubt as well as know.