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Curiosity, from its nature is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and they return with less and less of any agreeable effect.

— Edmund Burke

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Source: The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke: With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, and Portrait After Sir Joshua Reynolds, Volume 1, Holdsworth and Ball, 1834, p. 30.
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Edmund Burke

People must be governed in a manner agreeable to their temper and disposition; and men of free character and spirit must be ruled with, at least, some condescension to this spirit and this character.

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The rights of the people are every thing, as they ought to be in the true and natural order of things.

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Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

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I am well aware, that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty.

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The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

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All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

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There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

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Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

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Topics

Curiosity

More quotes by Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Speech at a County Meeting of Buckinghamshire (1784)

You can never plan the future by the past.

A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

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My brain, otherwise a sound instrument, has a serious defect—a hypertrophied lobe of curiosity.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edmund Burke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.