Ideas Quotes
1,027 quotes
"Libraries were full of ideas–perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons."
"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
"Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not."
"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."
"Ideas come from everything"
"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth."
"Different people have different ideas. We need to kill them—the ideas, not the people. The people we just need to torture."
"All the ideas in the universe can be described by words. Therefore, if you simply take all the words and rearrange them randomly enough times, you’re bound to hit upon at least a few great ideas eventually. Sausage donkey swallows flying guillotine, my love assembly line."
"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]"
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]"
"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.[Remarks Recorded for the Opening of a USIA Transmitter, February 8 1963]"
"You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness."
"You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live."
"A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear."
"The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better."
"The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake."
"Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg."
"I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas."
"Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever."
"Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance."
"The lampshade on my head is for my bright ideas. I won't be able to convey them until Monday, when my curtain gets out of the dry cleaners."
"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write."
"88. People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris."
"A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns."
"The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it."
"I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them."
"But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)"
"Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much."
"When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?"
"In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe."
"All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news."
"The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them."
"... a good idea always attracts other good ideas."
"There are lots of great ideas in my book, but as a cohesive unit, my book is only held together with glue at the spine. Or it would be, if it weren’t an ebook."
"Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole."
"I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel."
"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."
"A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them."
"Do not get obsolete like an old technology, keep innovating yourself."
"If the thought inspires you, and it feels good and right...it is yours, alone, to exercise. So get right on it!"
"An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours."
"Most ideas are born and lost in isolation."
"The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance."
"But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven."
"A thousand years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, they knew the Earth was flat. Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
"Perhaps you are just close to what you have been waiting for all along and ideas start formulating in your mind and advising you to "give up". Tell them "not me"."
"Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge."
"Your thoughts carry you wherever you want to go. Weak thoughts don’t have the energy to carry you far!"
"Ideas were found by the freethinker, expressed by poet with the new words,formulated by scholar into knowledge."
"Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world."
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