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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"You don't want to be the smartest person in the room; you want to be the dumbest in the room. You want to be surrounded by other thinking people who are going to say something that makes you think, "Oh, my God, that's an amazing idea. Why didn't I think of that.""
"Creating is really what I like to do. The best thing in the world is to have an idea in the back of your head and then to make that idea into a movie and have people all over the world enjoy it."
"Sometimes it's easy to have ideas, but somebody has to find a way to do it. Often those responsible for finding a way don't have the idea."
"I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea."
"Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea."
"China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea."
"She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had simply happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. (On Diana Wynne Jones)"
"Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?" "Then what died? who are you mourning?" "A point of view."
"The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series."
"Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation must form our judgment."
"The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth."
"A certain harmony should be kept between actions and ideas if we want to fully develop the effects they can produce."
"I like my jokes to be built on a foundation of ideas, or at least smart observations."
"The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred."
"Man is more than his environment. It is from the innate quality of the Spirit in him, his inner storehouse, that he draws those ideas, his intuitions, which unify his perceptions of the external world instantaneously with a value which is qualitative and not quantitative, and which he embodies in the works of his culture - those achievements which belong not only to one particular time but to all times, and mark the path of his upward progress."
"It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas."
"The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas."
"Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears."
"I do not like the idea of happiness - it is too momentary - I would say that I was always busy and interested in something - interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness."
"Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary."
