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
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
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Ideas are your children, for you have no others. Ideas are your contribution to posterity.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
GRACE HOPPER
attributed, Built to Learn
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
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
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
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
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
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
Good ideas do not need to be shouted. They can take care of themselves.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Self," Reactions and Other Essays
An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man knocking over the solid furniture.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notebooks
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
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
The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, 1836
Ideas are the pulses of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.
MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Elric: The Stealer of Souls
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
LINUS PAULING
attributed, "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology", 1995
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