Quotes About Idea

Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.

Sadness is a very interesting idea, this idea of sadness being some kind of default setting that artists will go into. And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness, and the idea that sadness is very loud, and happiness is quiet.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even get the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth... we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

Where we go wrong is that we bring along some ready-made idea of God, wherever we may have learned it, and then try to make Jesus Christ fit in with that idea of God. But if we take the idea of a revelation of God in Christ seriously, then we must be willing to have our understanding of God corrected and even revolutionized by what we learn in Jesus Christ.

A good idea if not acted upon produces terrible psychological pain. But a good idea acted upon brings enormous mental satisfaction. Got a good idea? Then do something about it. Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Here's something to remember: Actions feed and strengthen confidence; inaction in all forms feeds fear. To fight fear, act. To increase fear--wait, put off, postpone.

If you fall in love with an idea, you won't see the merits of alternative approaches-and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life's great pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you're free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? What would happen if you kissed it goodbye?

Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before.

If there is no idea in the drawing, there is no idea in the constructed project. That's the expression of the idea. Architects make drawings that other people build. I make the drawings. If someone wants to build from those, that's up to them. I feel I'm making architecture. I believe the building comes into being as soon as it's drawn.

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form.

It's absolutely of no importance who or what V was under the mask. He isn't a who or a what, he's an idea. The thing is, you couldn't continue it. Now and then the idea of a sequel has been raised, in vague forms, but I think it would be a bad idea. The story's finished.

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

I think that most people don't think in terms of an American revolution, they think in terms of a Russian revolution, or even a Ukrainian revolution. But the idea of an American revolution does not occur to most people. And when I came down to the movement milieu seventy-five years ago, the black movement was just starting, and the war in Europe had brought into being the "Double V for Victory" [campaign]: the idea was that we ought to win democracy abroad with democracy at home. And that was the beginning of an American revolution, and most people don't recognize that.

What happened was I was invited to meet Tom [Hardy] to discuss a project that he had in his mind about an adventurer who returns to England from Africa with secrets and with a history, and the original idea was set some 80 years later than it is now. But in the conversation I really took to the idea and I'd wanted for a while to set something in 1830 and 1840 in London, so it struck a chord.

My view is that an investor is better off knowing a lot about a few investments than knowing a little about each of a great many holdings. One's very best idea's are likely to generate higher returns for a given level of risk than one's hundredth or thousandth best idea.

The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.

I'd rather have half of my idea change the world than my whole idea be a few papers in a journal.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

Tell me what's wrong with this idea: If you're selling to somebody, find someone like that person to sell to them. If you're trying to reach swing voters, if you're trying to reach people on the fence, if you're trying to reach Republicans who are unsure about this candidate... get people who switched! Get people who are registered Republicans. Get people who were George Bush voters who can't bring themselves to do it again. Talk to them, get them to explain what their reasons are, and show them to people. What's wrong with this idea?!

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

What we have to do is strike a balance between the idea that government should do everything and the idea, the belief, that government ought to do nothing. Strike a balance.

Most of the time we like the idea of our own freedom. There are times when we do not at all like the idea of the freedom of others. If we suffer because of their freedom, let us remember that they suffer because of ours.

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.

And so you [young Americans]need to be the Idea Generation. The generation who's always thinking on the cutting edge, who's wondering how to create and keep the next wave of American jobs and American innovations, who's figuring out how to out-compete the Idea Generations of Indias and Chinas of the world.

The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.

A word, and all the infinite fluctuations it may possess. Like that moment when you know you have something to say, and you know you're speaking, even, but you still have no idea how you will say it. Or the moment when, as a reader, you're reading, and you are understanding what you are reading, but still have utterly no idea what will come next for you, what precisely the author wants to say. For me, that is the ultimate level of literary depth, of literary density.

One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

Don't look back. Just go ahead. Give ideas away. Under every idea there's a new idea waiting to be born.

If I do something for a public space, it's not something that I have in my head and go, "Oh that's a good location. I should put it here." That for me never exists. When I see the site, then I have an idea that is new and I would never do unless it's there. It's the space or the people there, which will give me the idea.

An unbending and absolute acceptance of any idea is a sure sign of a small mind, no matter the greatness of intellect possesed by the one accepting that idea.

Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You’ll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down.

Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.

An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it's not worth it.

In many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability.

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

That's why I ended up leaving school - because it required so much time, and it was such an excellent idea. I figured I would regret not going full force with this idea. It seemed we could make something of it.

When you're trying to come up with an idea for a movie it's actually the hardest part - the germ of the idea. Inevitably you think of something that would be great and then discover that it was on an episode of The Simpsons.

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It's not "integrity," it's "always do the right thing." It's not "innovation," it's "look at the problem from a different angle." Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

What was the idea behind Hot Pockets? Was there a marketing meeting somewhere, 'Hey I got an idea: How about we take a Pop-Tart and fill it with really nasty meat? You could cook it in a sleeve thing, and you could dunk it in the toilet.'

The environment becomes inspiration. My response to it becomes idea. And idea becomes purpose and action through interpretation and painting.

The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.