all the virtues of character seem to belong to us from birth… For we are just and moderate and courageous and the rest straight from our birth … even children and animals have these natural dispositions, through they evidently prove harmful without rational guidance.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity … It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyong our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.
Augustine, late forth / early fifth century AD (from The Closing Of The Western Mind by Charles Freeman)
disease of curiosity
He fixed the foundations of the earth that it shall not be moved forever
Psalm 102
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaw
