Diversive curiosity makes us want to know what lies on the other side of the mountain; epistemic curiosity arms us with the knowledge we need to survive when we get there.

“Our comforting conviction the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

The naughtiness of infants is experimental, a method of data collection.

Diversive curiosity is where the hunt for knowledge begins, in the desire for new information, sensations, experiences, and challenges. But it’s only a beginning. If there’s something oddly familiar about Burke’s description, that’s probably because it might be used to describe the way we often use the Internet: clicking from link to link,

Not being satisfied is what makes curiosity so satisfying.

Culture freed humans from the limitations of their biology; according to evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, when humans discovered culture, they achieved a momentous shift in the balance of power “between our genes and our minds.”

It is sobering to think that even at such an early age, infants are capable of telling whether or not you’re an idiot—a judgment that, when you think about it, demands substantial cognitive and social abilities.

We confuse the practice of curiosity with ease of access to information and forget that real curiosity requires the exercise of effort.

The more we know about something, the more intense our curiosity is about what we don’t know.