Pursuit of Understanding Quotes

Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.

Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.

I just think that I'm a person who's trying to find the truth and express it as I, you know, get the opportunity.

My inspiration is really very simple: I'm struck by things that I want to know more about. I really do react just as a curious person: who is this person? What's the story behind this situation? Why do people like this or dislike this thing?

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?

Curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence, and requires youth, leisure education, genius and example to make it govern any person

Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.

And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.

The path to knowledge is a forced one. In order to learn, we must be pushed. On the path of knowledge we are always fighting something, avoiding something, preparing for something; and that something is always inexplicable, greater and more powerful than us.

It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

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

What are the questions you wish to ask?

The truth is an ambition which is beyond us.

Questioners sooner or later end up in a library... And answers are dangerous; they kill your wonder.

we reach with our hands and brush away the clouds and pierce the sky to reach the moon and Mars but we still can't reach the truth

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.

The starting point is a question.

Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

It wasn't the New World that mattered... Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life - the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

I wouldn't want to live life in an untroubled garden, blissful and ignorant. I would want to get out into the world, and be a part of something. In a way I was born into the Garden of Eden, or as close as you can get in our world; I was born white, male, and in Palo Alto. I had it pretty kush.

A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

I usually find that the process of discovery is more interesting than the answers.

It would be necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom...

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.