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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"But I love the idea - whether it's in my work or where I live - exploring new frontier, and I like putting myself in strange places and trying to survive and figure things out and gather up an infrastructure. I like knowing that I could figure out a way to live anywhere."
"When you have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to you or what your career's going to end up like and you're just really open to anything, then you don't really have anything to loose."
"Violence is sometimes a very practical solution but I don't think it is the ultimate solution. Owning a gun is not OK for me. But I could argue both sides. Why shouldn't people own them? I'm not fundamentally against citizens having access to a weapon but I think it has complications. It's probably not the wisest idea. Obviously, it has consequences. Personally, I do not own a weapon."
"In setting up a business under the name and meaning of the Golden Rule, I was publicly binding myself, in my business relations, to a principle which had been a real and intimate part of my family upbringing. Our idea was to make money and build business through serving the community with fair dealing and honest value."
"When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards."
"Taking offense has become America's national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them."
"And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe."
"The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time."
"When a new idea comes our way, we must put it on our mental scales and weigh it carefully before deciding its value."
"Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart."
"A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."
"Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you?"
"I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!"
"Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons."
"I had been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a dome on it."
"When we conceive a new idea we are thinking directly from the creativity of God."
"The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this."
"A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes."
"The most important step of all is the first step. Start something! What if that idea you have in the back of your head is a really good one, one that might end up helping tens of thousands of people? You owe it to the world ot act. Or maybe it will help only a few people: The same advice applies. If you don't do it, you are missing out on something big, and so are the people who could have been helped."
"To develop the creative attitude, analyze and focus on the wanted SOLUTION; seek out and fill your mind with the FACTS; write down ideas, both sensible and seemingly wild; let the facts and ideas simmer in your mind; evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas."
