The value of curiosity — Bertrand Russell
“The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity, it is inspired by a genuine love of knowledge. You may see this impulse in a moderately pure form, at work in a cat which has been brought to a strange room, and proceeds to smell every corner and every piece of furniture. You will see it also in children, who are passionately interested when a drawer or cupboard, usually closed, is open for their inspection. Animals, machines, thunderstorms, and all forms of manual work, arouse the curiosity of children, whose thirst for knowledge puts the most intelligent adults to shame.
This impulse grows weaker with advancing years, until at last what is unfamiliar inspires only disgust, with no desire for a closer acquaintance. This is the stage at which people announce that the country is going to the dogs, and that ’things are not what they were in my young days’. The thing which is not the same as it was in that far-off time is the speaker’s curiosity. And with the death of curiosity we may reckon that active intelligence, also, has died.”
— Bertrand Russell, On Education (1923), Ch. II: The Aims of Education, pp. 59-60
