People like people who are like them.
This is the foundation of the law of listening: You have to listen to understand.
Listening is a powerful building block: Continue improving your listening skills and your likability will naturally increase.
But continuing to initiate conversations and be curious about people is fundamental to building valuable relationships, because curiosity creates connections—that is the law of curiosity.
At the point where you find yourself closing down from communicating openly in a relationship, you have a choice about how you would like to proceed. One way forward is to lay fresh layers of protection around your vulnerable heart. You are dampening the other person’s ability to hurt you, but you are also less able to communicate your own love genuinely. You are essentially preparing yourself for an inevitable breakup. The alternative is loosening up your expectations and reconnecting with that curiosity you were able to offer at the beginning of the relationship. You commit to exploring where you are stuck, where you have put up that protective shielding, and how you can open yourself more to your partner. This is a way to deepen a relationship, by recommitting to applying gentle curiosity toward learning about your lover.
Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.
Embrace the importance of curiosity. Certainty is the opposite of growth. Don't live life as if you have everything figured out. Read, be curious, and always be open to change — because after all, where has your current thought process gotten you?
The knowledge of all things is possible
I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.
I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
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.
Curiosity is more important than knowledge.
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it
The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.
Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.
Curiosity is a call from knowledge.
What you don’t know has power over you; knowing it brings it under your control, and makes it subject to your choice. Ignorance makes real choice impossible.
Humans became the only species to acquire guidance on how to live from the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors, rather than just from their DNA.
The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues.
