Quotes & Sayings About Curiosities

THE PEERLESS PRODIGIES OF PHYSICAL PHENOMENA AND GREAT PRESENTATION OF MARVELOUS LIVING HUMAN CURIOSITIES — Frederick Drimmer

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods. — Michael Koryta

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency?
Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority? — Frank Lloyd Wright

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off. — C.S. Lewis

The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII ... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period ... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near. — Alfred De Musset

Juanita Rose Violini's Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible and the Ignored is delightfully odd, wonderfully weird, and anything but normal. Filled with historical curiosities and esoteric advice, the book explains legends, the paranormal, and the people who experience the fringe. Have fun, but don't get too close this book may be contagious. — Jeff Belanger

If the 'Principle of Relativity' in an extreme sense establishes itself, it seems as if even Time would become discontinuous and be supplied in atoms, as money is doled out in pence or centimes instead of continuously;-in which case our customary existence will turn out to be no more really continuous than the events on a kinematograph screen;-while that great agent of continuity, the Ether of Space, will be relegated to the museum of historical curiosities. — Oliver Lodge

Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more - but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read? — Toni Morrison

The explorers seek happiness in finding curiosities, discovering new lands and undergoing risks in adventures. They are thrilling. But where is pleasure found? Only within. Pleasure is not to be sought in the external world. — Ramana Maharshi

We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. — James Hillman

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York - and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. — F Scott Fitzgerald

People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among the details, not in the realm of pure generality. We must tackle and grasp the larger, encompassing themes of our universe, but we make our best approach through small curiosities that rivet our attention - all those pretty pebbles on the shoreline of knowledge. For the ocean of truth washes over the pebbles with every wave, and they rattle and clink with the most wondrous din. — Stephen Jay Gould

While Cabinets of Curiosities were intended to be microcosms of the world, and to symbolise a ruler's all-powerful control of his realm, Rudolf's came to mean much more than that. It become his refuge from personal and political turmoil, a private universe he could control. — Joanne Owen

I don't belong there."
"You do. Because of who you are. WHAT you are. One half brimming with dark curiosities and a fierce appetite for all things mad. But the other half whimsy and light - filled with courage and loyalty."
He bites his lower lip, a gesture so minute I might've imagined it.
"Nothing can break the chains you have on my heart. For you ARE Wonderland."
-Unhinged, pg 179 — A.G. Howard

Mr. Irvine ... had given him advice: not
advice about how to think as much as advice about how to be, about how to be a curiosity in a world in which curiosities weren't often tolerated. "People are going to think certain things about you because of how you walk," Mr. Irvine had once said to him, and he had looked down. "No," he'd said. "Don't look down, Jude. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You're a brilliant man, and you'll be brilliant, and you'll be rewarded for your brilliance. But if you act like you don't belong, if you act like you're apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too." He'd taken a deep breath. "Believe me." Be as steely as you want to be, Mr. Irvine had said. Don't try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable. — Hanya Yanagihara

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities. — Thomas Sowell

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an
intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues. — Joseph Conrad

Have you seen the sand-roses of the Sahara? Such is the violence of the Khamsin that it whips grains of sand together, presses them, finally builds them into great blocks, big enough and solid enough to be used for walls in the oasis. And beautiful! Whew! For all that, they are not real rocks. Leave hem in peace, with no possible interference - what happens? (I brought some home, and put them "in safety" as curiosities, and as useful psychometrical tests.) Alas! Time is enough. Go to the drawer which held them; nothing remains but little piles of dust. — Aleister Crowley

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My favorite words in the world are these:
"what" and "if" in conjunction.
They question curiosities
in simple form and function.
"What" is a query of broadest scope.
"If" is wonder that fuels all hope.
Together they lasso the mind like rope, and spur the wildest deductions! — Richelle E. Goodrich

Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. — Yuval Noah Harari

In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars ... and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn't take much notice of anything ... other than how heavy ... and awkward the bottle had become. — Oliver Jeffers

It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know. — Susanna Clarke

Why would God create people with all these desires and curiosities and then punish them for trying to satisfy them? — Belle Blackburn

Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge ... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position. — Robertson Davies

A studio allows you to indulge your untidiness and your penchant for toys and curiosities that really wouldn't work in a grown-up house. — Jamie Cullum

He wasn't here to satisfy my idle curiosities. And it held its own fascinations: a man who talked like an innocent and fucked like a sybarite. — Alexis Hall

Historically, the Old Charges fall into three groups. The first comprises the two earliest versions, the Regius MS of c.1390 and the Cook MS of c.1420 ... The second, and largest, group begins with the Grand Lodge No. 1 MS, dated 25 December 1583, and covers all the versions datable before the formation of the premier Grand Lodge in 1717. The third group comprises manuscript and printed versions produced after 1717, the majority of which appear to have been produced as antiquarian curiosities. — John Hamill

When you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information? — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities. — Anna Journey

Lex was about to ask what in the dickens that was supposed to mean, but then Uncle Mort nodded at Wicket in a secretive manner, which roughly translated as 'Screw you and your curiosities, Lex. We're telling you NOTHING. — Gina Damico

We always feel the brunt of the blow dealt to us, but hardly ever do we feel the impact we have on others. Why is that? — Richelle E. Goodrich

Tomorrow will always hold curiosities but it is the enchantment of today's possibilities which has me true to the present. — Truth Devour

But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way
a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in
separate backyards. — Lionel Shriver

I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies. — Elvis Costello

It can be lost, and it will be, if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded not as the supreme expression of our profound belief, but merely as curiosities in glass cases. — Harry S. Truman

Paths. Curiosities lurked around every corner. A man belched flames from a podium. The scent of fried cakes and popcorn hung sweet and heavy on the air, tantalizing until it became sickening. And — Madeleine Roux

Unfortunately, the only recognized relics of yesterday's farmers are obsolete curiosities when the greatest relic, their philosophy of living, is seldom considered. — Eric Sloane

It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours ... and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. — Robert Louis Stevenson

To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing. — Robert Louis Stevenson

As bad as we humans abuse Nature, I personally don't think we can 'kill' her. She does not belong to us, we belong to her, and she can kick us to the curb in an instant, if ever she's of a mind to do so. She is laughing at us and our arrogance, and could squash us like a bug at any moment. Our trinkets and technologies are curiosities to her, nothing more. They are like flashes of light: here and gone in an instant, like Sauron's Ring was in the hands of Bombadil. — Steve Bivans

The 370-year-old antique shop Trifles and Folly is the heart of 'Deadly Curiosities,' my new urban fantasy novel from Solaris Books. — Gail Z. Martin

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities. — Giles Foden

The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself. — Henry David Thoreau

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school. — Ray Bradbury

Little Dorrit's old friend held the inkstand as she signed her name, and the clerk paused in taking off the good clergyman's surplice, and all the witnesses looked on with special interest. 'For, you see,' said Little Dorrit's old friend, 'this young lady is one of our curiosities, and has come now to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in what I call the first volume; she lay asleep, on this very floor, with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she's now a-writing her little name as a bride in what I call the third volume. — Charles Dickens

When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become "producers " they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is "yes," and that a "no" is defeat. — John Holt

You do. Because of who you are. What you are. One half brimming with dark curiosities and a fierce appetite for all things mad. But the other half whimsy and light - filled with courage and loyalty. — A.G. Howard

Darwin, Marx, and Freud meet. They may have understood other things, but the human soul, and in particular the soul of Culture-man, they did not understand. Systems like theirs are only historical curiosities to the 20th century, unless they happen to claim to be appropriate descriptions of Reality. Anyone who believes in these antiquated fantasies stamps himself as ludicrous, posthumous, ineffective, and superfluous. No leading men of the coming decades will be Darwinians, Marxians or Freudians. — Francis Parker Yockey

Suppose we took a thousand negatives ...
combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city - that would be my favorite picture. — Berenice Abbott

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment. — Daniel Bell

Find pleasure in every moment, indulge in every whim. Let lesser races feel the burden of their crude lives. We are beyond such concerns or worries. Every power is ours to use, every sensation ours to experience. We are truly masters of the galaxy, and all others exist only to satisfy our curiosities. We have earned our position of power. Let us forever taste the fruits of such achievement. Time itself is ours to command. We are eternal. — Unknown

It required unusual inquisitiveness to pursue the development of scientific curiosities such as charged pith balls, the voltaic cell, and the electrostatic machine. Without such endeavors and the evolution of associated instrumentation, initially of purely scientific interest, most of the investigations that lead to the basic equations of electromagnetism would have been missed ... We would have been deprived of electromagnetic machinery as well as knowledge of electromagnetic waves. — Frederick Seitz

Here's a news flash: scientists can be wrong. That's no big deal (unless the scientist is you), since research is self-correcting. Consequently, most errors by scientists become historical curiosities, with little long-term importance. — Seth Shostak

The Diogenes Club is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft one of the queerest men. He's always there from quarter to five to twenty to eight. It's six now, so if you care for a stroll this beautiful evening I shall be very happy to introduce you to two curiosities. — Arthur Conan Doyle

How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe! — John Aubrey

Our culture is obsessed with youth because we have lost the ancient knowledge that growth never stops. We are not transient, momentary mistakes in
the cosmos- evolutionary curiosities that rise like mayflies, swarm for a day, and are gone. We are players who are here to stay, and the universe was built with us in mind. We reflect it, with our deepest loves and loftiest aspirations, just as it reflects us. — Eben Alexander

How mean and foolish are the living, with their never-ending terrors and curiosities, the puny effort of their lives, when faced with the quiet, kingly dead. — Hermann Hesse

To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,
while society fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases. — Remy De Gourmont

I promise to dream with you both great dreams and small dreams. To ask your counsel in times of uncertainty. To honor your silence when you seek to be alone. To be ever wondrous at your curiosities and revelations. And to be ever rejuvenated by your passions ... — Carew Papritz

The folly of Interpreters has been, to foretell times and things by this Prophecy, as if God designed to make them Prophets. By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy also into contempt. The design of God was much otherwise. He gave this and the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men's curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the Interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world. — Isaac Newton

I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities, said Virginia satirically. — Oscar Wilde

To proceed with the Biblical curiosities. Naturally you will think the threat to punish Adam and Eve for disobeying was of course not carried out, since they did not create themselves, nor their natures nor their impulses nor their weaknesses, and hence were not properly subject to anyone's commands and not responsible to anybody for their acts.It will surprise you to know that the threat was carried out. Adam and Eve were punished and that crime finds apologists unto this day.The sentence of death was executed. — Mark Twain

Dantes examined the various articles shown to him with the same attention that he had bestowed on the curiosities and strange tools exhibited in the shops at Marseilles as the works of the savages in the South Seas from whence they had been brought by the different trading vessels. — Alexandre Dumas

Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life. — John Dewey

O man, I beseech you do not treat God's promises as if they were curiosities for a museum; but use them as every day sources of comfort. Trust the Lord whenever your time of need comes on. — Charles Spurgeon

Along with astronomy and alchemy, collecting was what made Rudolf happy. He mistrusted people. He could hear them now. Whispering voices. Murmuring in the walls. Rustling through leaves. He heard them everywhere he went. Everywhere, that is, except within the confines of his private chambers. Here the voices fell silent. He felt comfortable surrounded by his curiosities, for objects can't answer back. Objects can't betray. — Joanne Owen

I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards. Were you still installed in my kitchen, slathering crunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'd no sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear vicious drool, than this little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we're having pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich. — Lionel Shriver

Minute and elaborately finished pictures never strongly impress the mind, and are but mere curiosities to gratify persons insensible to higher excellencies. — Samuel Prout

Now in the 21st century, the boundaries separating chemistry, physics, and medicine have become blurred, and as happened during the Renaissance, scientists are following their curiosities even when they run beyond the formal limits of their training. — Peter Agre

one of those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. — Victor Hugo

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners. — Oscar Wilde

The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

In Economics as almost everywhere else, with all our cleverness, we have become decidedly less wise, while knowing more and more about less and less. We have lost the sense of proportion--so indispensable for every economist--while analysing the curiosities of hypothetical economic situations and forgetting what has a bearing on real economic life. In spinning out the fine threads of the New Economics, we forget the most elementary principles of economics, and while stressing what might
at best in highly exceptional circumstances we overlook what are almost perennial truths. While proudly parading our elaborate equations we unlearnt that simple common sense which consists in reckoning with human reactions and institutions as they really are. — Wilhelm Ropke