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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"Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king."
"We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end."
"So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years."
"The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death."
"What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!"
"Groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas."
"I love the classics but there are many new ideas to be made into reality. I'd rather be concerned with my own thing. There are many masters of classical piano so I'll leave it to them."
"I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled."
"The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd."
"Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist."
"I didn't worry about what DeNiro thought... I went in, looked him in the eye, and got the part. I was confident, even though I'd never done anything like it before. Now I realise it was ignorant confidence-I had no idea."
"A mathematical idea should not be petrified in a formalised axiomatic setting, but should be considered instead as flowing as a river."
"Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas."
"If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there."
"Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive."
"The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."
"Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone."
"There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one's own, to be precisely "like other people."
"How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?"
"I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you… My precious, my darling, my dearest!"
