"Thirst for knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bring their own judgment to bear on every question presented to them. His father, who had been high priest before him—for the great offices of Egypt were for the most part hereditary—while he had been delighted at the thirst for knowledge and the enthusiasm for study in his son, had been frequently shocked at the freedom with which he expressed his opinions as step by step he was initiated into the ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... and had some familiarity with Greek. In later life he studied Anglo-Saxon and Italian. But Jefferson terminated his collegiate course with a possession far more valuable than all the learning he could gather in the narrow curriculum of a colonial college; study had excited in him that eager thirst for knowledge which is an appetite of the mind almost as unconquerable as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... prayer to be granted. His mettle must be tried in the school of patience and drudgery. He must fulfill his contract with his master. For seven years he was faithful to his work, while his heart was elsewhere. And all that time, in the eagerness of his thirst for knowledge, he was imbibing facts which helped him to plan electrical achievements, the possibilities of which have not, to this day, been exhausted,—or even half realized. Like Franklin, he seemed to forecast the ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... lucky enough to be sent on a course of instruction. There were voluntary classes for the study of tactics at which the younger officers sedulously studied the principles of out-posts, advance guards, rear guards and so on. Everyone wanted to know more of his new profession. The thirst for knowledge was not adequately quenched as there were unfortunately, too few courses and too few ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... time, the priest, poor man, had earned a moment of mental rest; but Paul's thirst for knowledge was insatiable. He began to ply him with questions about the Queen. And though Andre could tell him very little, and though he had heard all that the night before from Manuela, it interested him curiously to hear ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... you bored a hole in the door by way of observatory. Nay—do not deny it; I respect your thirst for knowledge. Does he never leave ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... heavens. Above all, it demonstrated that gravity extends throughout the universe. Still the longings of men were not appeased; they brought to view invisible suns sunk in space, and told their weight, yet the thirst for knowledge was not quenched. Men wished to know what all the suns are made of, whether of substances like those composing the earth, or of kinds of matter entirely different. Then was devised the spectroscope, and with it men audaciously questioned nature ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew. Children are by nature eager for information. They are always putting questions. This ought to be encouraged. In ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... produce, so he cares very little about them, and in no way guides himself according to them or their fashions. So far as the outer world comes to him, it is by the channel of the newspapers. He has all the boundless curiosity, the thirst for knowledge miscellaneous, pulpy, and piquant, which characterise those that dwell remote. When he gets hold of you he flies at you, hugs you, gets every blessed thing he can out of you. "Favourable specimen," you will say. That is true; but, as regards the independence and primitive state of mind, what I say ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... not lost or misapplied. He had an inexhaustible thirst for knowledge, and therefore read, with ardour and industry, every book he could lay his hands upon; and he has told this writer, that if reading had been painful to him, his ambition was so ascendant, and his determination to rise in the world so unalterable, that he would not have read less. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... by them all my life, and love nothing better than to talk with them, amuse them, and quietly notice their traits of mind and character; but I do not recollect more than one girl of Helen's age who had the love and thirst for knowledge, and the store of literary and general information, and the skill in composition, which Helen possesses. She is indeed a 'Wonder-Child.' Thank you very much for the Report, Gazette, and Helen's Journal. The ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... a remarkable degree the faculty of making those around him both respect and like him, and ere six weeks had passed, he had won the love of all his pupils. Even John Jr. was greatly improved, and Carrie seemed suddenly reawakened into a thirst for knowledge, deeming no task too long, and no amount of study too hard, if it won the commendation of her teacher. 'Lena, who committed to memory with great ease, and who consequently did not deserve so much ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... death-goddess held her sway; there lay Nastrand, the shore of corpses. Thither, where no living being could draw breath, thither troop after troop made its way. To what end? Was it to bring home the dead, as did Hermod when he rode after Baldur? No! It was simply to satisfy man's thirst for knowledge. Nowhere, in truth, has knowledge been purchased at greater cost of privation and suffering. But the spirit of mankind will never rest till every spot of these regions has been trodden by the foot of man, till every enigma has ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... I need not say that of Europe, of European life, I really learnt nothing. I listened to German professors and read German books on their birthplace: that was all the difference. I led as solitary a life as any monk; I got on good terms with a retired lieutenant, weighed down, like myself, by a thirst for knowledge but always dull of comprehension, and not gifted with a flow of words; I made friends with slow-witted families from Penza and other agricultural provinces, hung about cafes, read the papers, in the evening went to ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Offendene, had kept her on the watch for an opportunity of finding out where Gwendolen had put the key, of stealing it from the discovered drawer when the rest of the family were out, and getting on a stool to unlock the panel. While she was indulging her thirst for knowledge in this way, a noise which she feared was an approaching footstep alarmed her: she closed the door and attempted hurriedly to lock it, but failing and not daring to linger, she withdrew the key and trusted that the panel would stick, as ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... development of independent municipal power brought the noble and the burgher upon the same level, and developed a common sentiment for education. The activity of the crusades, already referred to, developed a thirst for knowledge. There was also a gradual growth of traditional learning, an accumulation of knowledge of a certain kind, which needed classification, arrangement, and development. By degrees the schools of Arabia, which had been prominent in their development, not only of Oriental learning but of original ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence of life. A keen thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thousands round the poorest scholar and welcomed the barefoot friar. Edmund Rich— Archbishop of Canterbury and saint in later days—came about the time we have reached to Oxford, a boy of twelve years old, from a little lane at Abingdon that ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... boys gave up their ponies altogether, wore store clothes and took 'em off when they went to bed all the time they were in college; but, try as I would, I couldn't make the answers as ridiculous as his questions. He had me on the mat, two points down and fighting for wind all the time. His thirst for knowledge was wonderful and his objection to believing what his eyes must have told him was still more wonderful. There he was, half-way across the country from New York, and he must have looked out of the car windows on the way; but he hadn't seen a thing. I suppose it was because he wasn't looking ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... an open book on the bench beside him; he measured his steps with conjugations of Latin verbs when he walked to Dale with his finished work over shoulder; he studied every spare moment, when his daily task was done, and kept this up, from a youthful and unreasoning thirst for knowledge and defiance of obstacles, until he was twenty-one. Then one day he packed away all his old school-books, and never studied them again regularly; for something happened which gave his energy the force of reason, and ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fortunate possessor of a truly wonderful memory, is enabled to retain the bulk of the information which he has acquired by wide reading. There is a story told of a certain don at one of our older universities who, being possessed of an insatiable thirst for knowledge coupled with an excellent memory and an inexhaustible capacity for work, passed as a well-read if not a very learned man. There seemed to be few topics upon which he could not discourse on equal terms even with those who had made that ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... an affectionate kiss on the painted wooden lips. Surely there lies deep in the nature of man an impulse to eat anything he loves, to lift to his mouth every new object and there, if possible, reduce it to its original, constituent parts. A wholesome thirst for knowledge impels him to seize the object, penetrate into its interior and bite it to pieces. On the other hand, touching stops at the surface, while grasping affords only imperfect, mediate knowledge. Nevertheless ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... so-called, is the culmination of an eight-days' ceremonial, an elaborate prayer for rain and for crops. Possibly something of the significance of parts of its complicated ritual may have been forgotten, for some of our thirst for knowledge on these points goes unquenched, in spite of the courteous explanations the Hopi give when our queries are sufficiently courteous and respectful to deserve answers. And possibly some of the things we ask about are "not for the public" and may refer to the secret ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... the South, the knowledge thus acquired has been snatched from the spare records of leisure in spite of their owners' wishes and watchfulness."[2] C.G. Parsons was informed that although poor masters did not venture to teach their slaves, occasionally one with a thirst for knowledge secretly learned the rudiments of education without any instruction.[3] While on a tour through parts of Georgia, E.P. Burke observed that, notwithstanding the great precaution which was taken to prevent the mental improvement of the slaves, ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... long, double row of coking-ovens building on the flat below the furnace, and the furnace itself taking on undreamed-of magnitudes under the hands of the army of workmen. Thomas Jefferson did his best to keep the pace, being driven by a new and eager thirst for knowledge mechanical, and by a gripping desire to be present at all the assemblings of all the complicated parts of the threefold machine. And when he found it impossible to be in three places at one and the same moment, ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Naples, the school of Egbert at York, the schools of Charlemagne in the New Christian Empire, with Alcuin as minister of education; the later universities, with their tens of thousands of eager students—Paris, Cologne, and Oxford—sprang into being obedient, indeed, to a thirst for knowledge, but a thirst for knowledge which, in turn, owed its existence and intensity to the unique fact that Christianity alone among religions can assimilate and employ all the truths of human philosophy, of science, ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... we shall remember the solitary and little-related man, with no children, when he was sad, to play with in his house! His thirst for knowledge, his bent to investigate and study whatever had been said and done in the world, would have made him an antiquarian save for his patriotic ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... this craving, that when fifteen years of age (incredible as it seems), he had already perused two thousand volumes, among which his powerful and vivid intellect had been able to weigh the contradictions of all the principal modern and ancient systems of philosophy. This thirst for knowledge (anomalous according to the rules of both school and college) was the more extraordinary that it existed in him together with a passionate love for boyish play, and the indulgence in all the bodily exercises, in which he excelled, and on ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... eagerness for labor and his thirst for knowledge, Proudhon," says Sainte Beuve, "was not content with the instruction of his teachers. From his twelfth to his fourteenth year, he was a constant frequenter of the town library. One curiosity led to another, and he called for book after book, sometimes eight or ten at one sitting. The ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... quietly down. Before him, on a table, lay several manuscript books, gaily and gorgeously bound; he mechanically opened them. Florence's fair, noble Italian characters met his eye in every page. Her rich and active mind, her love for poetry, her thirst for knowledge, her indulgence of deep thought, spoke from those pages like the ghosts of herself. Often, underscored with the marks of her approbation, he chanced upon extracts from his own works, sometimes upon reflections by the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instructed,—has been called the "badge of a mason." And most appropriately has it been so called; for, whatever may be the future advancement of the candidate in the "Royal Art," into whatever deeper arcana his devotion to the mystic institution or his thirst for knowledge may carry him, with the apron—his first investiture—he never parts. Changing, perhaps, its form and its decorations, and conveying at each step some new and beautiful allusion, its substance is still there, and it continues to claim the honorable title by which ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... of things, from the Christian and other religions and European policy down, for her thirst for knowledge seemed to be insatiable. But what really interested her was the state of affairs in Zululand, with which she knew I was well acquainted, as a person who had played a part in its history and who was ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... returning from my peripatetics, I was accosted with brutally open-mouthed clamour, by my landlady, who, dragging me in a state of bewilderment into her room, pointed to numerous specimens of granite, which her "young people" had, in their unhallowed thirst for knowledge, discovered and drawn from my trunk, which, by some strange mischance, had been left unlocked! In vain I mumbled something touching my love of mineralogy, and that a lapidary had offered I knew not what for my collection. I was compelled to "bundle," as the idiomatic, but ignorant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... wine, explained how, were he officer in command, he would defend Leyden from attack by an overwhelming force. Very soon Van de Werff saw that he was a capable soldier who had studied his profession, and being himself a capable civilian with a thirst for knowledge pressed the ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Sym in his later youth, With the first clear glance in the face of guile, Thirst for knowledge and thoughts of truth, Of gilded baubles, and things worth while. And he said, "There is much that a Glug should know; But his mind is clouded, his years are few." Then joi, the father, he answered low As his thoughts ran back to ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... of their grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits, who closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son's cottage. Encompassed by such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years. Already the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge, and perseverance in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what he became. His mother would often be awoke in the night by the pleasant lisping of a voice "casting accompts; so intent was he from childhood in the pursuit ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... wonderful productions long afterwards, and with a satisfaction mingled with much sorrow, for it was after the decease of him in whose countenance I had first observed it. I admired the enthusiasm of my new acquaintance, his ardour in the cause of science, and his thirst for knowledge. I seemed to have found in him all those intellectual qualities which I had vainly expected to meet with in an University. But there was one physical blemish that threatened to neutralize all his excellence. "This is a fine, clever fellow!" I said to myself, "but I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... as Don Custodio, and the rascal still had the audacity to congratulate me. The Commission, which has taken as its own the decision of the arbiter, approves the idea and felicitates the students on their patriotism and their thirst for knowledge—" ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... beek's apostrophe. Although, at five o'clock in the evening, should the culprit be returning into the country in the same coach as his awful interrogator, he might be very apt to look fierce, and retort this amiable inquiry, and with equal thirst for knowledge to demand, 'D—your eyes, if you come to that, who and what are you?' And the beek in his turn, though so apt to indulge his own curiosity at the expense of the public, might find it very difficult to satisfy ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... after emancipation, Bryant then a young man, ran away from home and apprenticed himself to a physician who became interested in his thirst for knowledge and gave him an opportunity to attend school. After several years of hard study, he went before the board of examiners in order to teach. After 2 examinations he was immediately appointed to teach at the school where he had once ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... occult science is that it not only satisfies thirst for knowledge but gives strength and stability to life. The source whence the occult scientist draws his power for work and his confidence in life is inexhaustible. Any one who has once had recourse to that fount will always, on revisiting it, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... once more pervaded my heart. In the evening we wandered through the woodland paths, beneath the glowing Canadian sunset, and gathered rare specimens of strange plants and flowers. Every object that met my eyes was new to me, and produced that peculiar excitement which has its origin in a thirst for knowledge, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... believing in his own pretensions, and yet somehow indulging himself in a half-suppressed smile, which indicates that the humorous aspect of a question can never be far removed from his mind. Mere curiosity is not yet differentiated from scientific thirst for knowledge; and a quaint apologue is as good a reward for the inquirer as the discovery of a law of nature. The numerous class which insists upon a joke being as unequivocal as a pistol-shot, and a serious statement as grave as a Blue-book, should therefore keep clear ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... are made upon it, afford but little scope for the over acquisition of knowledge. Long will it be ere the English husbandman renounces for study the pleasures of his weekly holiday, and long may it be ere the Scottish peasant be withdrawn by a thirst for knowledge from the duties of his Sabbath, and from the simple rights of his morning and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... studies. This was pursuing knowledge under difficulties which would have proved insurmountable to many. But not so to Mr. Dayton, for he steadily gained; and though to an utter disregard for his unquenchable thirst for knowledge was added the daily fight for bread, he rose triumphantly above these difficulties, and mastered the most intricate mathematical calculation with the ease which is born only of a superior development of brain. Matthias had told us truly, and when he left us for his home ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell |
