Cognitive Curiosity Quotes

Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.

I just try to stuff my brain with everything that I can read on what is going on in science at a very high level, and sometimes I see connections of what might need to be done.

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?

We do not ask what hope of gain makes a little bird warble, since we know that it takes delight in singing because it is for that very singing that the bird was made, so there is no need to ask why the human mind undertakes such toil in seeking out these secrets of the heavens. ... And just as other animals, and the human body, are sustained by food and drink, so the very spirit of Man, which is something distinct from Man, is nourished, is increased, and in a sense grows up on this diet of knowledge, and is more like the dead than the living if it is touched by no desire for these things.

Wonder [admiratio astonishment, marvel] is a kind of desire for knowledge. The situation arises when one sees an effect and does not know its cause, or when the cause of the particular effect is one that exceeds his power of understanding. Hence, wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is annexed the hope of attaining understanding of that which one wants to know. ... For desire is especially aroused by the awareness of ignorance, and consequently a man takes the greatest pleasure in those things which he discovers for himself or learns from the ground up.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?

I think most people are inherently interested in how their brain works, in what makes them tick.

The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it.

Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.

My thoughts can sometimes be spurred by what I read, but my reading is extremely eclectic.

I love it when I come across a word I don't know. And I would never treat my audience like they weren't smart enough to come along with me.

I read every country's perspective on an issue. I also play many games like Bridge, Scrabble and Sudoku online.

I'll kind of get interested in a subject and I won't know why. It'll be in my head for many years and I'll say, 'Do I know enough here to research?'

I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.

I think we should sometimes read stories where everything's different from our world, don't you agree? There's nothing's like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.' --spoken by The Bluejay, aka Mo the Bookbinder, from 'Inkdeath

It's fun wandering around other people's minds.