Quotes About Ideas

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness.

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,-this is the very struggle of progress.

I have this massive notebook called IDEAS and another one called PERSONAL IDEAS and another one called CRAZY IDEAS.

What is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones.

Somebody who sticks to his guns can be called a stubborn person or a principled person, it depends on whether you like his ideas or not. You can call somebody whose ideas you don't like an ideologist or a person of ideas. You can call somebody whose actions you don't like a pragmatist if you like them, or an opportunist if you don't.

I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

That's the power of great insights. Insights, not ideas. There's a difference. Ideas, valuable though they may be, are a dime a dozen in business. Insight is much rarer -- and therefore more precious. In the advertising business, a good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.

[Great scientists] are men of bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas: they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.

What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

Ideas are abundant. Practice giving your ideas away. If you hold onto ideas too tightly, you can convince people (and yourself) that you may not come up with any new ones

Even after seeing so much bad art in the last few years, it still seems possible that one can be led to the right places. I haven't given up hope because there are always great artists, great minds, and great ideas. New ideas are what give you hope. You have to base your opinions on the quality of the ideas in the artworks.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

Personally I get so much of my inspiration from women in other countries, so I don't feel like American women are the leaders and I don't agree with the notion that Americans can accomplish more or do more. But I do think that what we can uniquely do here in America is mobilize and galvanize a lot of these ideas and resources. It's a war of ideas. We, Islamic women, are very well supported in this country by institutions, academic and nonprofit, that are already in the field endorsing women's rights and tolerance. The women in other communities have been the pioneers in this work.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.

Thinking is a social process. I talk to everyone from children to anthropologists and philosophers. I try my ideas out on people and they talk back to you. That's how ideas get formed.

Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.

The person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas.

Ideas attract money, time, talents, skills, energy and other complementary ideas that will bring them into reality.

The CBO is part of an intricate web that has been woven that is designed to be an obstacle to Republican ideas and greased lightning for Democrat ideas, while everybody claims it's nonpartisan. But that's not possible. It simply isn't nonpartisan, and it can't be.

...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.

The reason you go to university is to be taught, is to learn how to think more clearly, to call into question the ideas that you came with and think about whether or not they are the ideas you will always want to hold. A university education at its best is a time of confusion and questioning, a time to learn how to think clearly about the values and principles that guide one's life. Of course, it's also a time to acquire the skills needed for jobs in the "real world," but the part about becoming an adult with ideals and integrity is also important.

I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.

There's only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas.

I do believe that a belief in God is crazy, but that doesn't mean that the people who believe in it are crazy. Those are two different things. Ideas can be stupid and crazy, and the people who hold those ideas are not necessarily stupid and crazy.

Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.

When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

The older your teenagers are, the more they will have their own ideas and opinions. If you take them seriously, rather than assuming your ideas are always best and the only ones, you will begin to grow a relationship that will extend beyond the hormone-group years.

Good ideas will always get funded, so that's not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

Often culture gets stuck in static, traditional narratives. Contemporary ideas give culture elasticity, flexibility, which is always a breath of fresh air. But these ideas shouldn't only be for people who can afford to go to a museum or a symposium in the "better part of town."

The vast amount of time it takes to make my paintings is very challenging. I have so many exciting ideas I would love to bring to a final painting, but my time-consuming technique limits the number of ideas that get to become a painting.

Labor is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action - ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.

When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas - such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

Our ideas of self are created by identification. The less we cling to ideas of self, the freer and happier we will be.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.

Somebody's buying these treasury bills at 1/20th of one percent. I mean we consuming about $2 billion a day of goods and services beyond what we're producing.And it reflects American's consumption ideas rather than its savings ideas.

I've got loads of ideas. I just have no idea what to do with those ideas

When things [writing] are over, I always think, 'well, I'm never going to do anything again because I have no ideas so I'm going to go be a farmer'. Or else ideas will come and and if not then I become a farmer. Hopefully won't happen.

I like to be risky every day, changing minds every day. I'm not reliable at all in my ideas. I can change my ideas three times a day. I change different things, the parts of the content. But I never change the content of who I am. So my challenge every day is to change and to take risks.

I address myself to the Communists, to those Communists who were prompted to join the Party by the progressive ideas of mankind and socialism, and not by selfish personal interests - let us represent our pure and just ideas by pure and just means.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

In a society that considers all genuine ideas subversive, which seeks to discourage ideological imagination, and which aims to abolish thought in favour of spectacle, the main goal must be to awaken people’s consciences, raising traumatising problems and sending ideological electroshocks: shocking ideas.

I worry all the time that I'm going to run out of ideas, you know? I always tell my mom my fashion ideas, because I know she'll remember them.

Democracy necessarily means a conflict of will and ideas, involving sometimes a war of the knife between different ideas.

I turn on the machines and start to think about ideas and take it from there, it usually begins if it's a beat, a track creating a beat/beats and then the bass-line/lines, then comes the sounds--drones, atmospherics etc, then the edits of various sounds I created and keep going till I feel I have enough sounds ideas to start working and building a track. I have many banks of sounds that we hear that can be manipulated in the machines.