Ideas quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything."
"Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."
"The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea."
"My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person."
"I resent the idea that people would blame the messenger for the message, rather than looking at the content of the message itself."
"When we deliberate it is about means and not ends."
"I believe with all my heart that America remains 'the great idea' that inspires the world. It is a privilege to be born here. It is an honor to become a citizen here. It is a gift to raise your family here, to vote here, and to live here."
"Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."
"To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing."
"A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device--within a strictly, constitutionall y delimited sphere of action--for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote."
"Money doesn't excite me - my ideas excite me."
"We have always tried to be guided by the basic idea that, in the discovery of knowledge, there is great entertainment - as, conversely, in all good entertainment, there is always some grain of wisdom, humanity, or enlightenment to be gained."
"The time to buy stocks is consistently over time. You should never buy your investments with the idea, 'I have to get a certain return.' You should look at the best return possible and learn to live with that. But you should not try to make your investments earn what you feel you need. It doesn't work that way. The stock doesn't know you own it."
"Destiny is not preordained. Destiny is ordained totally by you. Every single moment of your NOW existence is the result of your previous thought. The idea that everything is already laid out for you in advance is a hallucination. You can and do manifest your own destiny."
"Fear of the unknown... They are afraid of new ideas... They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on... "If something is new, I reject it immediately because it's frightening to me." What they do instead is just stay with the familiar. You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe, are the most mysterious."
"Our thoughts, our feelings, our dreams, our ideas, are physical in the universe."
"You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements."
"The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written."
"Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation."
"If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged."
