282 Ideas Quotes

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

Just to prove that even the silliest idea can be pursued to its illogical conclusion, Legal Realism spawned Critical Legal Studies.

A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

I have just discovered the truth, and can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.

It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

Progress comes from finding better ways to do things. Don't be afraid of innovation. Don't be afraid of ideas that are not your own.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.

Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.

Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.

Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.

The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses.

Getting every employee's mind into the game is a huge part of what a CEO job is all about. Taking everyone's best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. There's nothing more important.

I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.

Some people should just start ideas and other ones should carry them out.

My inspirations don't come from outer space, they just come to me. I have no idea why they come when they do.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

When I want to play music, you've got to get me on tape or else it goes.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

If there is something to steal, I steal it!.

'The Law of the Persistence of Entities: The natural tendency of ideas to exist, to resist the inevitable, and to persist.'

He's a pre-Copernican obscurantist.

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come into contact with a new idea.

Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

An idea is a feat of association.

Half the world is composed of those who have something to say but can't; the other half is of those who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.

The night of the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. The first star that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was the herald of the dawn.

I am simply in favor of intellectual hospitality - that is all. You come to me with a new idea. I invite you into the house. Let us see what you have. Let us talk it over. If I do not like your thought, I will bid it a polite 'good day.' If I do like it, I will say: 'Sit down; stay with me, and become a part of the intellectual wealth of my world.' That is all.

I do not claim that I have floated level with the heights of thought, or that I have descended to the very depths of things. I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber. That is all.

The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf - a philosopher or servant, - but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.

Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.

In his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping arete's place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that arete, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a 'true' order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.

The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states... buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done.

Ideas come from the earth. They come from every human experience that you've either witnessed, or have heard about, translated into your brain, in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born, from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone. That's the easiest thing on earth is to come up with an idea. And the second thing is, the hardest thing on earth is to put it down.

The instinct of creativity must be followed by the act, the physical act of putting it down for a sense of permanence. Once you get that prod, that emotional jar, that, 'I have witnessed something.' Or, 'I have felt something.' Or, 'I have seen something.' Or, through observation, 'I have been moved by an event.' I think the answer is, 'Get it down. Get it down quickly. Write it down.'

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

A good idea is like a yo-yo-it may go to the end of its string, but it doesn't die there; it only sleeps. Eventually it rolls back up into your palm.

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

On resiste a l'invasion des armees; on ne resiste pas a l'invasion des idees.

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we are at no loss to perceive that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.

Now, without directly altering the existing condition of things, it is possible to work upon the human mind and character, and give them a direction no more correspondent with that condition; and this it is precisely which he who is wise will endeavour to do. Only in this way is it possible to reproduce the new system in reality, just as it has been conceived in idea; and in every other method (setting aside the evils which arise from disturbing the natural order of human development) it is changed, modified, disfigured by the remaining influence of preceding systems, in the actual state of circumstances as well as in the minds of men. But if this obstacle be removed,-if the new condition of things which is resolved upon can succeed in working out its full influence, unimpeded by what was previously existing and by the circumstances of the present on which this has acted,-then must nothing further be allowed to stand in the way of the contemplated reform.