However, emotion is a critical part of our capacity to comprehend the world at all, the ability to understand and interact with other living beings. Without it we are foolish, however much we may know, and we are only alive in a diminished sense of the word. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)

Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl – The Marginalian

It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when we judge, we cannot understand. True curiosity is therefore a form of love, because, as the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh so plainly and poignantly put it, “understanding is love’s other name.”