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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"Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."
"Meditation transports one from the transient world of matter to the real world of dreamings, visions, and imaginings where idea is and concepts are born."
"That is the trouble with many inventors; they lack patience. They lack the willingness to work a thing out slowly and clearly and sharply in their mind, so that they can actually "feel it work." They want to try their first idea right off; and the result is they use up lots of money and lots of good material, only to find eventually that they are working in the wrong direction. We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin."
"The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas."
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
"Art is actually based on the notion that if you would really celebrate an idea or a principle, you must think, you must plan, you must put yourself completely in the state of devotion, and not simply give the first thing that comes to your head"
"Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas."
"Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience even if you're the only one in a sea of doubters."
"To put that into some perspective, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore had first taken the idea of the Kyoto Protocol up to the Congress, the United States Senate voted it down 95 to nothing."
"If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself."
"The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang."
"Every idea that strengthens you must be taken up and every thought that weakens you must be rejected."
"The Human subject is the most important thing. My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away."
"An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think."
"Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite."
"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
"A thought is an idea in transit."
"If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void"
"Now, you two – this year, you behave yourselves. If I get one more owl telling me you've – you've blown up a toilet or –" "Blown up a toilet? We've never blown up a toilet." "Great idea though, thanks, Mum."
