Sublime

Unfettered curiosity is wonderful; unchanneled curiosity is not.

Adam Phillips

This is what I call purposeful curiosity, the kind that gets you off your couch and propels you to solve complex puzzles. It is about immersing yourself into the unknown with clarity, passion, courage, and a positive, enterprising attitude. This kind of curiosity requires effort, patience, and resources and may lead you to exhaustion, but it is als

Furthermore, curiosity is accessible to everyone. Passion can seem intimidatingly out of reach at times—a distant tower of flame, accessible only to geniuses and to those who are specially touched by God. But curiosity is a milder, quieter, more welcoming, and more democratic entity.

In our adult lives it generates a restless desire for new information and new experiences. Just as it made us peer into rock pools as children, as adults it makes us refresh Twitter streams.

Prior work has linked curiosity to happiness and innovation—two phenomena that are highly desirable in many cultures and societies. Curiosity is correlated with flourishing and physical activity, and is anticorrelated with depression.22 Moreover, curious people are often innovative people who have the capacity to be world changers by imagining a di

Scholars generally boil it down to “information-seeking” behavior or a “desire to know.” But curiosity is more than a feeling and certainly more than an act.

The traditional view not only overemphasizes nodal acquisition as the primary marker of curiosity but also locates the edge in desire, stretched between individual and information.

One particular behavior that is often thought to epitomize curiosity is the collection of items in a so-called cabinet of curiosities.