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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"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions."
"We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves."
"I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat."
"Dancing almost always turns out to be a good idea."
"The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate."
"You need more than an idea to run a business"
"I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future."
"Tourism has affected Cuba, because tourists come and they bring racist, sexist ideas. They bring a whole vision that there are rich people all over the world and that's the way it should be."
"Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it."
"There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . ."
"A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea."
"I don't do things that are comedic. This is such a crazy idea."
"Our investments continue to be few in number and simple in concept: The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph. We like a business with enduring competitive advantages that is run by able and owner-oriented people. When these attributes exist, and when we can make purchases at sensible prices, it is hard to go wrong (a challenge we periodically manage to overcome)."
"I have no idea on timing. It’s easier to tell what will happen than when it will happen. I would say that what is going on in terms of trade policy is going to have very important consequences."
"I want to represent the idea that you really can make what you want I believe I can create whatever I want to create."
"True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience"
"Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration."
"Thank God for the creative ideas that enrich life by adding your own creative contributions to human progress"
"I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion."
"There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal."
