Stories and Wisdom from a Life Fully Lived

Category: Food for Thought

  • Curiosity

    Curiosity is the motivator that energizes exploration, experimentation, adventure, discovery, creativity, and progress.

    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.

    ― Samuel Johnson

    We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity. In a different kind of environment, our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.

    — Orville Wright

    I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

    ― Albert Einstein

    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.

    — Eleanor Roosevelt

    There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward — opening up new doors and doing new things — because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting.

    ― Walt Disney

    Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.

    — William Arthur Ward

    Perhaps one day men will no longer be interested in the unknown, no longer tantalized by mystery. This is possible, but when Man loses his curiosity, one feels he will have lost most of the other things that make him human.

    — Arthur C. Clarke

    Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the only one who asked why.

    — Bernard Baruch

    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.

    ― Graham Swift

    Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

    — Stephen Hawking

    Curiosity is the essence of human existence. Who are we? Where are we? What do we come from? Where are we going? Was there life on Mars? Is Mars like Earth is going to look in a billion years? Are we what Mars looked like a billion years ago. I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there and around the corner. But I want to find out.

    — Gene Cernan, American astronaut

    Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That’s all it was: just curiosity.

    — Jim Morrison

    The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”

    ― Stephen Fry

    Socrates told us, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I think he’s calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.
    ― Roger Ebert

    The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It’s a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

    ― Ken Robinson

    Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

    — James Stephens

    I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.

    ― Michael J. Fox

  • Science

    Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

    Carl Sagan

  • Take The Shot

    You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.

    Wayne Gretzky

  • Searching

    Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

    Carl Jung

  • Quotes I Like

    “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

    Martin Luther King Jr.

    Martin Luther King Jr. first delivered this famous line in a sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1957. They later included it in his 1963 book “Strength to Love,” in which King expounded on his philosophy of nonviolence and his belief that a powerful, loving presence binds all humans. Although regularly targeted by hate speech and discrimination, King adamantly insisted that only love could rid the world of its prejudice. To this day, as people protest peacefully for equality, they embody King’s ideals, promoting love in the belief that it will someday drive out hate.

    For a visual artist, a blank canvas can be a problematic thing, just like a blank page for a creative writer. What to do? Where to begin? That’s where imagination typically plays its part. Imagination is a powerful ability; without it, humans would never have come so far. As Carl Sagan once wrote, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” 

    Indeed, without imagination, Salvador Dalí couldn’t have painted “The Persistence of Memory,” and Antony Gormley couldn’t have sculpted “The Angel of the North.” As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” This idea is echoed in a beautiful quote often attributed to the Italian sculptor and painter Michelangelo: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

    The following quotes show how important imagination has been in the creative process of famous artists through the ages, from Leonardo da Vinci to Georgia O’Keeffe. For some, imagination transcended art, becoming a fundamental part of human existence.

    It is not enough to know your craft — you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.
    — Edouard Manet

    Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.
    — Francisco Goya

    A person without imagination is like a teabag without hot water.
    — Alan Fletcher, acclaimed British graphic designer

    I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.
    — Georgia O’Keeffe

    The idea or the faculty of imagination serves as both rudder and bridle to the senses, inasmuch as the thing imagined moves the sense.
    — Leonardo da Vinci

    The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.
    ― William Blake

    I do not paint by copying nature… Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.
    — Paul Gauguin

    Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination, do not become the slave of your model.
    — Vincent van Gogh

    No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
    — Edward Hopper

    I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.
    — Grandma Moses, folk artist

    I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination.
    — Marsden Hartley, modernist painter

    Art lives through the imaginations of the people who are seeing it. Without that contact, there is no art.
    — Keith Haring

    To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter’s imagination.
    — Frank Auerbach, German-British painter

  • Timeless Insight

    “An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power.”

    — David Dunning