Youthful Curiosity Quotes

I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.

There is an almost universal experience in physicists, at least of my generation, which is home-made pyrotechnics.

Young people are still looking and older people have found.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.

Children come running to the truth But you've got to peel the skin to get the fruit And while one's living high another's grieving But what's sweet by morning is bitter by the evening Oh - What's sweet by morning is bitter by the evening.

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

In my youth, I spent my time investigating insects.

...youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

As a kid, when I got to the edge of a cliff I wanted to jump off. I didn't want to kill myself. I wanted to fly.

I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records. They were modern records, at the time in the '50s, and I realized that I didn't fully get what was going on. But I liked a lot of what I heard.

What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.

Other kids would be playing with their Action Man, and I was questioning life and society.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.

A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.

To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.

When I was 14 I would pick up my brother's bass guitar, and I would just pound on it, having no idea how to play it.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

I spent my entire youth in front of a TV watching old movies, and as soon as I was able to get a subway pass, when I was 14, I joined the Museum of Modern Art and was there all weekend watching old movies.

You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.

You will cast away your cards and dice when you find the sweetness of youthful learning.