Children Curiosity Quotes & Sayings

The job of a teacher is to excite in the young a boundless sense of curiosity about life, so that the growing child shall come to apprehend it with an excitement tempered by awe and wonder. — John Garrett

The amazing advance public attention to this film is surely due not so much to us (I mean to the curiosity our undertaking arouses) as to that Beauty and Beast we thrilled over as children. Happily, there is some remnant of childhood in this jaded public. It is this childhood we must reach. It is the incredulous reserve of the adults that we must overcome. — Jean Cocteau

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come? — Carl Sagan

All children are curious, I think, but not all adults are. — Anne Roe

The most important thing is actually raising up children with a true and lasting burning sense of curiosity. I don't even know how they do it. Good parents are a marvel. — Ezra Miller

So now you must choose ... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder ... — Jostein Gaarder

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. — Aldous Huxley

Children usually have a natural curiosity about the world and everything in it until they get to school and somebody throws them against the locker because they get A's and act intelligent. After that, some kids try to dumb it down and adapt. — Joshua Neik

The biggest problem which is ever than is from the parents by saying "Don't give your money to the kids" or something like this. People must learn to risk, to make risks, not to be people which to play safety. If it is safety where is adrenaline? Where is the mess?? Where is the curiosity?? Where is the reward after all done??
Where are the challanges which change your way of thinking?? Where are the lessons???
Parents should teach their child or children about safety and about the risk. "They must say to them that to make risk is the part of the proccess! — Deyth Banger

She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity about the universe for a comforting children's story. Harper could understand the impulse. She was a fan of children's stories herself. But it was one thing to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon reading Mary Poppins and quite another to think she might actually turn up at your house to apply for the babysitting job. — Joe Hill

One of the most devastating enemies of the family is radical sex education in the public school. It is more explicit than necessary for the good of the child. Too much sex education too soon causes undue curiosity and obsession with sex. — Beverly LaHaye

(Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with "girls'stories" such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience ... — Thomas Hardy

Provide lots of opportunities for children's natural curiosity to manifest itself. With very young children, our role is one of supporter and guide. — Lilian Katz

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident. — Narendra Modi

It's more important than ever that we find new ways to cultivate curiosity - because our careers, our happiness, and our children's flourishing all depend upon it. — Oliver Burkeman

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience. — Steven Erikson

Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline and who manage to grow up before they blow up are invited to join the Yale faculty. Within the university they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers ... it is a place where the world's hostility to curiosity can be defied. — Edmund Morgan

Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own capacity for wide-eyed wonder. — Gabor Mate

When I was little I knew my father had been an orphan and had lived in an orphanage. I was curious, but my father wouldn't satisfy my curiosity. He told only one story about the orphanage, and that was of sneaking out and buying candy, which he sold to other orphans. He said he had a pretty good business going
till he was busted! I guess he told that anecdote because he was the hero of it and I suspect he was rarely the hero as a child, more often the victim. There's a photo of the actual orphanage on my website, and you can see it's a forbidding looking place. — Gail Carson Levine

The world of the known and the not yet known is bridged by wonderment. But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child's world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world. As media merge the two worlds, as the tension created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes. Curiosity is replaced by cynicism or, even worse, arrogance. We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, in short, without children. — Neil Postman

Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child's very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness - and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. — Alice Miller

As children we all possess a natural uninhabited curiosity, a hunger for explanations, which seems to die slowly as we age
suppressed, I suppose by the need not to appear ignorant. — Mahlon Hoagland

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. — Mortimer J. Adler

Asking how astronauts go to the bathroom is one of the most common questions put during NASA or space museum outreach sessions. To cope with the curiosity, for a while the agency posted a video that featured a fully-clothed volunteer showing exactly how it was done: with a mirror, sometimes. Young is often asked about it. "Interest from the public is strange. Women don't care. They think, they worked it out and that's that. Men have an almost unhealthy interest. Children are interested in the poop factor." What everybody should actually be interested in is the drinking pee factor. — Rose George

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. — R.D. Laing

We are afraid that our adult sexuality will somehow damage our kids, that it's inappropriate or dangerous. But whom are we protecting? Children who see their primary caregivers at ease expressing their affection (discreetly, within appropriate boundaries) are more likely to embrace sexuality with the healthy combination of respect, responsibility, and curiosity it deserves. By censoring our sexuality, curbing our desires, or renouncing them altogether, we hand our inhibitions intact to the next generation. — Esther Perel

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance. — Ken Robinson

All children are born with stars in their eyes, and they are curious. It is important for teachers to be careful not to kill this curiosity. A lot can go wrong. Children can be teased, even by teachers. — May-Britt Moser

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity. — Yehuda Berg

Curiosity in children is but an appetite for knowledge. — John Locke

The innocent curiosity of children gives them astounding courage. — Plague Jack

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. — William S. Burroughs

It is the power of questions that embolden us and keep us as expectant children, all the while developing the power of human consciousness. — Dan Sanders

Education means only this- that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education. — Doris Lessing

Inherent in this rejection of evolution is the idea that your curiosity about the world is misplaced and your common sense is wrong. This attack on reason is an attack on all of us. Children who accept this ludicrous perspective will find themselves opposed to progress. They will become society's burdens rather than its producers, a prospect that I find very troubling. Not only that, these kids will never feel the joy of discovery that science brings. They will have to suppress the basic human curiosity that leads to asking questions, exploring the world around them, and making discoveries. They will miss out on countless exciting adventures. We're robbing them of basic knowledge about their world and the joy that comes with it. It breaks my heart. — Bill Nye

Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction ... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up ... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race ... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.". — Isidor Isaac Rabi

With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say that the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. — John Dewey

Schooling that children are forced to endure - in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the "learning" is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children's true interests - turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children's natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels. — Peter Gray

If we understand the signals they are giving us, middle school kids can be fun and adventurous. If wse can find it in our hearts to overlook some of their quirky and mysterious behaviors, we can find them to be energetic and curious about how the world works around them. If we see the world as they view it, we can take their hand and guide them across the narrow bridges and frightening valleys they see sprawling before them. And finally, if we can reveal the patience to talk with them about the issues that confuse and bedevil them, we can find a world open for discussion and journey. — Dr. Kid Brain

Linnie. And this Winnie." They wore identical smiles, their bright black eyes sparked with curiosity. "Are you the doctor?"
"No, I'm just volunteering."
"I knowed that, too." Winnie gave her an exaggerated shake of the head. "Girls is never the doctor. They's the nurses."
"Oh no, what about Dr. Clare? Huh? The lady doctor who took care of Grammy in the hospital when she broke her hip bone?" Linnie asked.
"Yeah, but she was a white lady. They can be doctors." Winnie looked at Lucy. "Right? There are white lady doctors. I seen 'em."
Lucy felt her eyes go wide. Were there children who still believed your gender or color dictated your career? "There are white lady doctors, black lady doctors, white man doctors, black man doctors."
They stared at her.
She thought for a moment. "And there are white man nurses and black man nurses, too."
"Now you're just bein' silly," Linnie said and let out a laugh. — Mary Jane Hathaway

In an era of parental paranoia, lawsuit mania and testing frenzy, we are failing to inspire our children's curiosity, creativity, and imagination. We are denying them opportunities to tinker, discover, and explore - in short, to play. — Darell Hammond

All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions. It is hard to satisfy the curiosity of a child, and even harder to satisfy the curiosity of a scientist, and methods that meet curiosity with satisfaction are thus not apt to foster the development of the child into the scientist. I don't advocate turning all children into professional scientists, although I think there would be advantages if all adults retained something of the questioning attitude, if their curiosity were less easily satisfied by dogma, of whatever variety. — Marston Bates

Maddy Patti and the Great Curiosity" is about an everyday hero, a youngster, who learns to live with his diabetes. Most relevant are "Tip" pages at book's end to help not only children, but also teachers and parents better understand diabetes. — Mary Bilderback Abel

My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history. — Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties. — Alice Duer Miller

Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?' said Nannie to Agnes.

It was at moments of crisis like this that Mary chiefly envied her Aunt Agnes's imperturbable disposition. Most mothers feel a hideous sinking at the heart when these fatal words are pronounced, but Agnes only showed a kindly and inactive interest.

In anyone else Mary might have suspected unusual powers of bluff, hiding trembling knees, a feeling of helpless nausea, flashes of light behind the eyes, storm in the brain, and a general desire to say 'Take double your present wages, but don't tell me what it is you want to speak to me about.'

But Agnes, placidly confident in the perfection of her own family and the unassailable security of her own existence, was only capable of feeling a mild curiosity and barely capable of showing it. — Angela Thirkell

Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten. — Hunter S. Thompson

I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old. — Johnny Depp

The American child is a highly intelligent human being; characteristically sensitive, humorous, open-minded, eager to learn, has a strong sense of excitement, energy, and healthy curiosity about the world in which he lives. Lucky indeed is the grown-up who manages to carry these same characteristics into adult life. It usually makes for a happy and successful individual. — Walt Disney

Infinity imagines curiosity from the wild abyss - Only the child makes a swing-set view of the worlds upside down. Unwatched truth is the enchantment of childhood.And we never grow out of it ... — Akiane Kramarik

Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I'm strong and opinionated. Those qualities brought me a lot of problems since I was a little girl in school, saying 'I don't agree' and fighting with the children. It's part of my curiosity for life. — Penelope Cruz

It is so important to allow children to bloom and to be driven by their curiosity. — May-Britt Moser

Sir Ken Robinson's 2008 talk on educational reform - entitled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" - has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children's scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless. — Ian Leslie

Montessori Schools. Dr. Maria Montessori developed the Montessori method of teaching in the early 1900s after observing children's natural curiosity and innate desire to learn. — Daniel H. Pink

Curiosity killed the cat". I had been one of those annoying children who constantly asked why after being told anything. It seemed that even as an adult I couldn't let things go. I had to dig deeper. I had to find out why. — Carrie Cox

Writing stretches me to my limits and affirms my potential, all while making me aware of my flaws, my mortality, and how much more I have to learn. It's a singular feeling, both spiritual and corporeal, and I like to think it sparks the same inspiration and curiosity in a child that it does in an old man. — Kit Williamson

One of the peculiar children's perspective out of time allows him to take minute interest in every resident of the town and to chronicle everything we did for the entire day he lives over and over. — Ransom Riggs

What is it that is done to our children that their puberty should deform them? They have the joy of movement; they have an enterprising curiosity; they are ready for sensible self-denial; they dream ahead, and they have a faithful memory, and, above all, great compassion. [ ... ] The well-meaning educator who flatters and humours the young not only does a disservice to the community, but also damages the individual by depriving him of the opportunities of self-discovery. — Kurt Hahn

Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble, I should judge, to lie with the schools. — Thomas A. Edison

If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done-I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education. — Paul Lockhart

A child dragging bent useless legs is crawling up the hill outside the village. Nose to the stones, goat dung, and muddy trickles, she pulls herself along like a broken cricket. We falter, ashamed of our strong step, and noticing this, she gazes up, clear-eyed, without resentment - it seems much worse that she is pretty. In Bengal, GS says stiffly, beggars will break their children's knees to achieve this pitiable effect for business purposes: this is his way of expressing his distress. But the child that lies here at our boots is not a beggar; she is merely a child, staring in curiosity at tall, white strangers. I long to give her something - a new life? - yet am afraid to tamper with such dignity. And so I smile as best I can, and say "Namas-te!" "Good morning!" How absurd! And her voice follows as we go away, a small clear smiling voice - "Namas-te!" - a Sanskrit word for greeting and parting that means, "I salute you". — Peter Matthiessen

Toddlers ask many questions, and so do school children - until about grade three. By that time, many of them have learned an unfortunate fact, that in school, it can be more important for self-protection to hide one's ignorance about a subject than to learn more about it, regardless of one's curiosity. — Jan Hunt

What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Sometimes, when you are busy and children ask funny questions, you don't think so much. You just answer quickly so they will leave you alone. If you don't answer, they will just keep asking or they will go and do something very bad. — Jinat Rehana Begum

Develop some intellectual curiosity. If you have it, you will never be bored. If you haven't, cultivate it, hold fast to it. Never let it go. To the intellectually curious, the world will always be full of magic, full of wonder. You will be interesting to your friends, to your spouse, and a joy to your children. You will be alive to all the wonderful possibilities of this world. — Marjorie Pay Hinckley

When we are children, we have a tranquil acceptance of mystery which is driven out of us later on, by curiosity and education and experience. But it is possible to find one's way back. With affection and respect, I disagree totally with Penelope Lively's conviction about the 'absolute impossibility of recovering a child's vision.' There _are_ ways, imperfect, partial, fleeting, of looking again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have. Children are not different animals. They are us, not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time. — Susan Cooper

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except ... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything. — Floyd Dell

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. — Mortimer J. Adler

In order for humanity to survive in the twenty-first century and beyond, we must nurture rather than repress children's natural curiosity. We must encourage them to be curious, instead of fearful, toward other cultures. — Paul K. Chappell

Curiosity should be as carefully cherish'd in children, as other appetites suppress'd. — John Locke

Children live life as a controlled experiment. — Jennifer Senior

If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place ... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop
unless it is hijacked by conditioning. — Roger Fouts

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them. — Russell Baker

I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments. — Bertrand Russell

What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. — Paul Tough

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius? — Stephen Jay Gould

Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know. — Criss Jami

In a house where there are small children the bathroom soon takes on the appearance of the Old Curiosity Shop. — Robert Benchley

A 'white' kid that asks too many questions is called *curious.* A 'black' kid that asks too many questions is called *forward.* — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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. — Graham Swift

Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A child's eyes, those clear, wells of undefiled thought - what on earth can be more beautiful? Full of hope, love and curiosity, they meet your own. In prayer, how earnest; in joy, how sparkling; in sympathy, how tender! The man who never tried the companionship of a little child has carelessly passed by one of the great pleasures of life, as one passes a rare flower without plucking it or knowing its value — Caroline Norton

Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been. — David Halberstam

Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of. — Otto Robert Frisch