Ideas quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I'm a very creative person, and the best part about creation is creating. So I always love to come up with new things, new ideas, new thoughts. I cherish things like that."
"The kernel, the soul let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing."
"The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living."
"It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today"
"Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself."
"If the idea of having to change ourselves makes us uncomfortable, we can remain as we are. We can choose rest over labour, entertainment over education, delusion over truth, and doubt over confidence. The choices are ours to make, but while we curse the effect, we continue to nourish the cause"
"One of the guys that used to run it - for some reason I've no idea why he used to call me the Sea Monster and I was just looking around for a name and thought that'll do. That lasted for a couple of years probably."
"For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation."
"They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing."
"The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone"
"The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have."
"I toyed with the idea of what it might be like to live with some species of heatstroke that maybe didn't go away all that quickly. He's a pirate, which is about rum, sodomy and the lash, isn't it? So, to be able to keep things like that in my head, when I'm going to do a film for Disney, I'd been through the ringer. That was like infiltrating the enemy camp. I wasn't able to stop smiling."
"There's this idea that when you turn 40, you automatically go to adult contemporary heaven, but I want to try and challenge that."
"Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas."
"It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas."
"I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program."
"Evolution... is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on Earth."
"I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there."
"A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage."
"People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."
