Tao Te Ching
Curiosity
Curiosity may have killed a cat; but, without curiosity, human beings wouldn’t be on a much higher level of the evolutionary spiral than cats and other animals. Without curiosity, we couldn’t expect much progress, realization, or evolution. During long periods of history, there was little external change and therefore less need for curiosity in adapting to challenging circumstances. Professions, roles, and skills passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, from generation to generation without much need for modification. Sparks of curiosity did ignite though during the golden ages of various civilizations. Einstein famously described how he had no special talents beyond just being passionately curious and that same curiosity represents a key to the longevity of mind and spirit. The old stay young when they nourish this kind of open-minded adventure; the young become old and dull when they sell their curiosity for complacency, entertainment, and status quo numbness.
Quotes (77)
“know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves… The unexamined life is not worth living.”
“Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites.”
“Getting distracted by trifles is the easiest thing in the world... If you are old, do not go far from the ship, or you might fail to appear when you are called.”
“There was a door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see”
“the first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning… for by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiring we arrive at truth”
“God would never give us reason, then give us divine laws that contradict such reason.”
“When have I ever opposed the reading of books? It is only that I differ from others in the way I read... so that students do not follow upon someone else's heels or depend on teachers, friends, and books.”
“One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life—either about God's secrets or one' wife.”
“Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.”
“Glory and curiosity are the two scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.”
“Begin with certainties and end in doubts; or begin with doubts and end in certainties.”
“to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.”
“And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
“Curiosity—the desire to know why and how—is a lust of the mind that exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.”
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, at least once in your life doubt all things.”
“So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success... unregulated inquiries and confused reflections of this kind only confound the natural light and blind our mental powers.”
“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so we can talk about it.”
“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”
“Ask questions about everything and investigate everything; things will start to go well when you are no longer fooled by books.”
“Paths of learning are necessarily divergent, they reflect the diversity of mankind.”
“We know accurately only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge... With wisdom grows doubt.”
“If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.”
“she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through —the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form”
“Only that mind draws me that I cannot read... The power men possess to annoy me, I give them with a weak curiosity.”
“To fear the examination of any proposition appears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.”
“First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers…He who knows most believes the least.”
“acquaintance with reality's diversities is as important as understanding their connection. The human passion of curiosity runs on all fours with the systematizing passion.”
“One's belief in truth begins with a doubt of all the truths one has believed before.”
“I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements, and operate the device entirely in my mind.”
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
“Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.”
“The incuriousness—the complete absence of science—of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even than their architecture... Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its' gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of India, China, Persia, Buddha or Zoroaster...”
“It is marvelous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home? We mistake unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle foreignness. For want of that inner curiosity... we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere resemblances... With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and passes in Switzerland... a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining heights of the Alps!”
“Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable.”
“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue… Live the questions now… live along some distant day into the answer.”
“Authentic religion ends stops when it believes it has found truth and ceases the search.”
“But to go deeper, beneath what people say—and their judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!—what did it mean to her, this thing she called life?”
“I think, 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.”
“It is no discredit to our species that in all ages its curiosity has outrun its wisdom, and its ideals have set an impossible pace for its behavior.”
“A man should never read his reviewers, nor be too curious about the verdict of posterity.”
“An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.”
“I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.”
“Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach?... that ardent inner curiosity which is the only true foundation for the appreciation of beauty—for beauty is inward, not outward... a flower blooms in our dooryard more wonderful that the shining heights of the Alps!”
“As long as you ask questions you are breaking through, but the moment you begin to accept, you are psychologically dead.”
“every man's mind ought to keep working all his life long; every man's imagination should be touched as often as possible by great works of imagination... education ought to end only with life itself.”
“As long as mankind is made up of independent individuals with free will, there cannot be any social status quo. Men will develop new urges, and these will give rise to new problems, which will require ever new solutions. Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.”
“Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.”
“"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was greater than the risk it took to blossom."”
“A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination.”
“Curiosity and irreverence go together, cannot exist without each other.”
“To the questioner, nothing is sacred, he detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead.”
“Curiosity and irreverence go together, cannot exist without each other.”
“The continual stream of new discovery and fresh revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of the eternal youth of the living Dharma and its wonder, splendor and spontaneity. ”
“Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.”
“We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.”
“Doubt is a condition of life quaking in the bone because the bone is on fire”
“Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.”
“The average person is not especially curious about the world. He is alive, and being somehow obliged to deal with this condition, feels the less effort it requires, the better. Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great all-consuming one at that.”
“We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.”
“Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding but curiosity evaporates. We need guts to go for the long haul. Like an amusing friend you can’t really trust, curiosity turns you on but then leaves you to make it on your own—with whatever courage you can muster”
“Those who make a difference do so because they are different… prepared to… ignore the warnings and rewrite the rules; plush back the barriers of the impossible.”
“So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”
“I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.”
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