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 think writers would do better to consider that idea [to write to yourself], because you know yourself really well, and you never know your demographic fully. You only get into trouble if you try to please somebody you don't really understand."
"It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want."
"Being overseas at the time it all kind of happened was perfect because I had no idea that it was going to attract so much media attention and provoke these lovely people calling in and offering up their opinions and advice."
"Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that. I draw energy from discussing ideas."
"I haven't encouraged [Julia Marie Pacino] or discouraged her. I let her go her own way. I did say to her that I thought that she had a real gift, and it's a good idea to know that. It's always good to go with your gift."
"I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture."
"I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher. The idea that it was hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn't think this way."
"There are exceptional loyalties and there are old fashion ideas about how you get loyalties, and after all the auditorium is full of people who have co-owned shares with the managers for many decades, and in many cases they co-invested when everyone was young and obscure. Also when you come back to a place like that you are celebrating old loyalties, and of course the basic idea behind so much of Berkshire is the old fashioned idea that the best way to get loyalty is to deserve loyalty."
"If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift."
"I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it."
"What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime."
"[Those] who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries, but they also make very poor observations."
"The language of soul. . . possesses a pronounced lyrical quality which is frequently incompatible to any music other than that ceaseless and relentlessly driving rhythm that flows from poignantly spent ideas."
"I am sort of anti-hunting. I don't put down what anyone wants to do, but it seems to me that killing a creature for fun is not a progressive idea."
"I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless."
"The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university."
"I want to keep growing as a writer. I find myself doing unexpected projects and sort of challenging my idea of where I am in my career, or what I'm supposed to be doing. In fact, I'm not supposed to be doing anything. Just finding projects that are challenging to me. I want to be a writer who keeps growing and figuring out new things and hopefully people will follow me along as I publish these things."
"Knowledge is power. Most of us agree that something has to be done to strengthen Social Security, and I believe it's irresponsible to arbitrarily dismiss any idea, Republican nor Democrat, without giving it a hard look."
"I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it."
"what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas."
