After having boned up on a mathematical theorem, a student who was attending geometry courses under the tuition of the famous mathematician Euclid asked the teacher, "Sir, what will I earn by learning all these things?". On hearing this Euclid called his assistant and told him sarcastically to, "give the boy 3 coins, as he wants to make money from what he learns".
The search for knowledge - without looking for profits or immediate returns - is a characteristic of superior animals, and it is in human beings that this is most marked. We could say the extraordinary curiosity of humans makes us a unique species! What motivates man in his curiosity? If at the dawn of mankind curiosity combined with a rapid apprenticeship was a synonym of life (surviving), it is no longer the case today. Nevertheless, man is more inquisitive now than he was in the past. Today newspapers, reviews, radio, television, internet are all unending sources of information flooding into our homes day and night to satisfy our hunger to know things, to learn, to be informed... to such an extent that the supply of information becomes unmanageable and so the gathering of information requires a "creaming off", i.e. the filtering of good and useful information and the separation of the wheat from the chaff.
Some scientists regard curiosity as what motivates our exploration behavior, including playing. I'd like to add that curiosity is a measurement of the "mental tonus", and is an antidote against stereotypes, overdeveloped self-satisfaction, and boredom. Everything can be source of knowledge; facts or things which seem worthless, inefficient, useless, absurd, odd, paradoxical or false may be instructive. Remember that America was discovered by the Europeans because Columbus made a navigational error!
To conclude, do you know who said: "I am neither especially clever, nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious"? No? The inventor of the theory of the relativity, Albert Einstein, a big kid!
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