"I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing."
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Ideas quotes
Ideas
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Ideas quotes (page 86 of 821)
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"You sharpen your ideas by reducing yourself to the level of the people you are with and a sense of humour and a complete relaxation, even when you're discussing serious things, does help to mobilise friends around you. And I love that."
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"What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject."
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"If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas."
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"Religion doesn't start with a set of laws or rules and it doesn't start with a set of ideas. It starts with an encounter, with the living God and in our case, Christ risen from the dead. In that encounter you meet someone you can trust. That's faith: trust in truth."
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"For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject."
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"Exchange ideas frequently."
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"There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas."
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"We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment."
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"Pacifism is a nice idea but it can get you killed. We're not there yet. Evolution is slow, small pox is fast."
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"I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief."
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"The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life."
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"People often ... have no idea how fair the flower is to the touch, nor do they appreciate its fragrance, which is the soul of the flower."
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"The idea of brotherhood re-dawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed."
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"Too much polishing and you spoil things. There's a limit to the expressibility of ideas. You have a new thought, an interesting one. Then, as you try to perfect it, it ceases to be new and interesting, and loses the freshness with which it first occurred to you. You're spoiling it."
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"Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination."
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"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."
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"The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."
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"The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact."
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"Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen."
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