Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
Source: Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston, 1942
Correctly attributed. 'Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose' is Hurston's, from her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (J. B. Lippincott, 1942), in the material on her anthropological fieldwork. The trailing sentence — 'It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein' — is also Hurston's voice and also from Dust Tracks, but I recall it sitting in the book's concluding passage rather than immediately adjoining the 'formalized curiosity' lines. So the author and the book are solid; the quote as presented may be a splice of two nearby-but-not-contiguous sentences. Holding confidence at 0.85 rather than higher for that reason. Recommend a human check against the 1942 text before treating this as a continuous quotation, and consider trimming to the first two sentences, which are the securely contiguous part.