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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"I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much."
"Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end."
"Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct."
"We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology."
"The idea that God resides in the unknown is what philosophers call the God of the gaps. And we have this thing called science, which marches on and makes discoveries in those gaps, ultimately closing gaps."
"This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago."
"Dark matter and dark energy are two things we measure in the universe that are making things happen, and we have no idea what the cause is."
"A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it.""
"Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can."
"People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick."
"I love making things. I love building things. I love the idea that something's in the world that wasn't there before."
""Ocean" is more about ... powerlessness and hopelessness. When we're very small we can't actually do anything - we have no say in what happens, we have no money or resources, we sometimes have no idea what's going on."
"None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know."
""Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain."
"I'm always open to new stuff. I don't sit and try to figure out what to do, I just wait for an idea to come."
"An idea discovered is much better possessed."
"I can get away with saying a lot of ideas that are young and naive. I'm liberated."
"The idea of making a fault a subject of study and not an object to be merely determined has been the most important step in the course of my methods of observation. If I have obtained some new results it is to this that I owe it."
"Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own."
"L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died."
