I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.
Interpretation
Curiosity drives discovery and creativity.
Mary Leakey's quote reflects her passion for exploration and the importance of curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge. It emphasizes how digging into the unknown and being inquisitive can lead to significant discoveries and creative expressions, showcasing both her archaeological work and her artistic inclination to depict her findings.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of curiosity in scientific research.
There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn... No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely
She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.
Basically, I have been compelled by curiosity.
No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.
When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.
It took them only an instant to cut of that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a singular one.
Nearly all men die of their medicines, not of their diseases.
There are many instances in science, where those closest to the intricacies of the subject have a more highly developed sense of its intractability than those at some remove. On the other hand, those at too great a distance may, I am well aware, mistake ignorance for perspective.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.