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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"I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed."
"To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action."
"I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts."
"We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence"
"The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways."
"The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd."
"There is too little idea of personal responsibility; too much of "the world owes me a living," forgetting that if the world does owe you a living, you must be your own collector."
"Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is."
"My reason for fixing them in office for a term of years, rather than for life, was that they might have an idea that they were at a certain period to return into the mass of the people and become the governed instead of the governors which might still keep alive that regard to the public good that otherwise they might perhaps be induced by their independence to forget."
"You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd."
"People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell."
"It is very difficult to make the ideas in my head come to life, but what is harder is making them look effortless."
"I just wanted to have fun for myself - I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions"
"It was an idea we had when Al was in the Senate - to organize and moderate an annual conference that would look at government policy through the lens of the family to help identify ways that the family can be supported and strengthened."
"The idea of losing someone that you love could throw you into a situation where you could not see your future and you really would be living in the past."
"If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write"
"Our idea of a real problem is someone else's idea of an ultimate dream. Put the 'problem' in perspective"
"And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."
"What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life."
"You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind."
