IDEA QUOTES III

quotations about ideas

Ideas can come anytime, anywhere, while I am making this gazpacho or going to the bathroom. I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

The Economist, Sep. 15, The Economist, Sep. 15, 2010


Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself.

MAX STIRNER

The Ego and Its Own


The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds.

JOHN C. MAXWELL

Be a People Person

Tags: John C. Maxwell


Ideas are your children, for you have no others. Ideas are your contribution to posterity.

SIMON MAWER

The Gospel of Judas

Tags: Simon Mawer


I like the scientific spirit--the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine--it always keeps the way beyond open--always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake--after a wrong guess.

WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations

Tags: Walt Whitman


My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty.

BRUCE LEE

Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living


Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.

G. K. CHESTERTON

Heretics

Tags: G. K. Chesterton


With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man knocking over the solid furniture.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Notebooks

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


Good ideas do not need to be shouted. They can take care of themselves.

JOHN DANIEL BARRY

"Self," Reactions and Other Essays

Tags: John Daniel Barry


As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

T. S. ELIOT

The Paris Review, 1959

Tags: T. S. Eliot


Every revolutionary idea--in science, politics, art or whatever--seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

The Promise of Space


Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.

LOUISE ERDRICH

Tracks

Tags: Louise Erdrich


The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

"Beyond Action and Reaction", The Art of Being Ruled


Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.

BARACK OBAMA

speech, Jun. 4, 2009

Tags: Barack Obama


New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.

MAX PLANCK

addressing the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, January 1936


If you're going to deal in the world of ideas, you have to be, to some extent, a salesman. And you're going to sink or rise according to your ability to be a good salesman of ideas.

BARRY DILLER

Playboy, Jul. 1989

Tags: Barry Diller


The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


Every man believes that if he could get capital interested, he could set the world on fire with his ideas.

EDGAR WATSON HOWE

Country Town Sayings

Tags: Edgar Watson Howe


Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions