Is Curiosity a Vice?

Knowledge is always good, but St. Thomas Aquinas said curiosity—or
the fickle pursuit of unnecessary knowledge—can be a vice. What he
meant, and what Fr. Mike means here, is that the methods by which
we feed our curiosity, and our motivation for feeding it, can lead
to vice if we just want to know something instead of pursuing what
we need to know. Those things we say we have to know about because
everyone else is talking about them—like that popular show we say
we simply cannot miss, or that things someone did that’s none of
our business but we just need to know about it—these things can
lead us away from a wholehearted pursuit of truth. The counterpart
virtue of unhealthy curiosity is studiousness, where the motivation
and method of pursuing knowledge are correct. Curiosity is a good
place to start, but it should always lead to studiousness, the
virtue of great minds.