A morbid curiosity is an example of addictive curiosity, the object of which is death, violence, or any other event that may cause harm physically or emotionally (see also: snuff film), the addictive emotion being explainable by meta-emotions exercising pressure on the spontaneous curiosity itself. According to Aristotle, in his Poetics we even "enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose sight is painful to us." (This aspect of our nature is often referred to as the 'Car Crash Syndrome' or 'Trainwreck Syndrome', derived from the notorious supposed inability of passersby to ignore such accidents.)
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Famous quotes containing the words morbid and/or curiosity:
“... many American Jews have a morbid tendency to exaggerate their handicaps and difficulties. ... There is no doubt that the Jew ... has to be twice as good as the average non- Jew to succeed in many a field of endeavor. But to dwell upon these injustices to the point of self-pity is to weaken the personality unnecessarily. Every human being has handicaps of one sort or another. The brave individual accepts them and by accepting conquers them.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)