Intellectual Curiosity Quotes

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?

To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.

Think your own thoughts.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.

The important thing is to never stop questioning. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those who find it.

Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance

Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one

Intellectually the French are wonderfully open, in a way the British just don't begin to be. You can question ideas in France, endlessly. In Britain, two things happen when you do that. Either you're branded an intellectual, which is fundamentally mistrusted, or you're branded a phony and pretentious, which people despise.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties. He who easily comprehends all that is before him, and soon exhausts any single subject, is always eager for new inquiries; and in proportion as the intellectual eye takes in a wider prospect, it must be gratified with variety, by more rapid flights and bolder excursions.

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

At present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit had been acquired. ... Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things.

I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.

Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

The first beginnings of wisdom...is to ask questions but never to answer any.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.