Ideas quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ideas — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The vampire craze is kind of fascinating. We're interested in the idea of immorality and I think we're drawn to people or creatures who can give in to those base impulses and just be bad and not feel bad about it."
"Maybe I'm naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street."
"You never know when you'll have a bad idea for a worse joke."
"I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that."
"The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it."
"Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea."
"I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kants idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, its an evolved machine that we carry with us."
"One of the things I've really gotten past in the last couple of years is the idea of being made uncomfortable by the way things appear, rather than how things are. Clearly in this business you have to contend with a lot of that."
"Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms."
"Ideas are like wandering sons. They show up when you least expect them."
"American democracy is in grave danger from the changes in the environment in which ideas either live and spread or wither and die."
"There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form."
"I work to promote the idea of sustainable capitalism driven by long-term considerations rather than quarterly profits, which seeks to better people's lives and the planet rather than destroy them."
"When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves"
"It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... There is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world."
"I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone."
"We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money."
"If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is."
"That, they never could lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the notion of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisoner's head was taken off."
"You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me."
