Quotes about ideas and thoughts
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“Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Source: Steve Jobs

“I get it the whole idea of willingly going to hell for someone. Living there insane if you have to because you’d rather be insane with them than endure life without them.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Life, Hell

“You were made perfectly to be loved and surely I have loved you in the idea of you my whole life long.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Love, Life, Anniversary, Wedding

“They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020) American author and journalist

“I was a beautiful vampire princess loved, worshiped and admired by all. I lived in a luxurious gothic castle and I have no idea how I ended up at this fiberglass table with you losers.”

Alyson Nöel book Evermore

Source: Evermore

Love, Beauty, Princess

“Hey, Dad, you’ve got to taste what we just did. It’s actually good. (Omari)
That is good. What did you two do? (Devyn)
No idea. We just added spices until it didn’t suck anymore. (Omari)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Ice

“Gotta head full of ideas that are driving me insane…”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

“She is so lost in her sadness that she has no idea how visible it is.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Sadness

“We're taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don't have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool let's somebody tell them who the enemy is.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: In Her Own Words, p. 152
Source: Assata: An Autobiography

Age, Fools, Communication

“The very idea of making shoes by hand boggled her mind.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Shoe

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense any more.”

Coleman Barks (1937) American poet

World, Soul, Sense, Grass

“Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, "I knew he loved me when de didn't come in my mouth.”

Andy Warhol book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Source: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Love, Girl

“I have no more idea now of who I am than I did before. But at least I know that. And I'm starting to figure out who I want to be.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

“An idea is salvation by imagination”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

Imagination

“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

Happiness, Horse, Night

“And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don't suppose I had any idea what I 'wanted' and so I was chosen, not choosing. There's glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Envy

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love

“We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

World, Success

“No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea, It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.”

Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer

Source: Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge

Game, Personality

“It’s what is in your head that determines what is in your hands. Money is only an idea.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money

“Where did you get that idea for a nose?
- Frizz Mizuno”

Scott Westerfeld book Extras

Source: Extras

“To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.”

Idries Shah book Reflections

Source: Reflections

People, Hope, Freedom

“Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Books, Cry

“A republican stands up in congress and says 'I GOT A REALLY BAD IDEA!!' and the democrat stands up after him and says 'AND I CAN MAKE IT SHITTIER!!”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Nothing’s Sacred (2005)
Context: The only thing dumber than a Democrat or a Republican is when those pricks work together. You see, in our two-party system, the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas. It usually goes something like this. A Republican will stand up in Congress and say, "I've got a really bad idea." And a Democrat will immediately jump to his feet and declare, "And I can make it shittier."

“people diminish me;
the longer I sit and listen to them
the more empty I feel but I don't get
the idea that they feel empty, I feel
that they enjoy the sound from their
mouths.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: Bone Palace Ballet

People, Feeling

“No, see the slide’s too high. He could fall and get a concussion. (Wulf)
Forget that. He could rack himself on the teeter-totter. (Chris)
Teeter-totter nothing. The swings are a choking hazard. Whose idea was it for him to have this? (Urian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Forgetting

“I think of you so often you have no idea.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Thinking

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Helen to Milicent

Life, Truth, Youth, World

“It is by acts, and not by ideas that people live.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

C'est d'actes et non d'idées que vivent les peuples. Series I: Sérénus http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/S%C3%A9r%C3%A9nus As quoted in The Ironic Temper : Anatole France and His Time (1932) The Literary Life (1888-1892) Variant: It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

People

“Do you have any idea how stubborn you can look? Our children better never give me that look, althought I won't mind if they give it to you. You'd deserve it.”

Christine Feehan book Night Game

Source: Night Game

Children

“It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

World, Way, Time

“Choosers will be beggars if the begging's not their choosing," said the Dog
"What does that mean?"
"I have no idea," said the Dog”

Garth Nix book Abhorsen

Source: Lirael

Dogs

“The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

People

“The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

The Decider (21 July 2007)

People, Problem

“It was a very bad idea. It was a terrible idea. It was the worst idea he had ever heard. It was irresistible.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Runaway Queen

“You can't go back, Ever. You can't change the past. It just is." I squint, having no idea what she's talking about. But just as I start to ask, she shakes her head and says, "This is our destiny. Not yours.”

Alyson Nöel book Blue Moon

Source: Blue Moon

Change, Past

“Hearthstone Passes Out Even More than Jason Grace (Though I Have No Idea Who That Is)”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library

Truth, Learning

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s Source: Selected Writings Context: It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Letter to Isaac McPherson http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html (13 August 1813) ME 13:333. The sentence He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. is sometimes paraphrased as "Knowledge is like a candle. Even as it lights a new candle, the strength of the original flame is not diminished."

Light

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.”

Isabel Allende book Eva Luna

Source: Eva Luna

Life, Color, Reality

“We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Asfixia

World

“I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And that there is one person in the world who is able to fly.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God

World, Personality, Flying

“She has no idea. The effect she can have.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Peeta to Katniss (p. 325)
Variant: I think... you still have no idea. The effect you can have.
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

“If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

People

“The sad truth about humanity… is that people believe what they're told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnWholly

People, Truth, Sadness, Time

“It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there's me.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

People

“I can offer you my life, but it is a short life; I can offer you my heart, though I have no idea how many more beats it shall sustain”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Life, Heart

“Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

God, Nature

“He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

Travel, Memory

“Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?”

James Hilton Random Harvest

Source: Random Harvest

“For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Hope

“And in what fairy tale would John ever be any sane person's idea of Prince Charming anyway? He was the opposite of charming. More like Prince Terrifying.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Abandon

Personality

“I just love dealing with people whose idea of sometimes is every thousand years,” I said.”

Laurell K. Hamilton A Kiss of Shadows

Source: A Kiss of Shadows

Love, People

“There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

“We all have one idea of what the color blue is, but pressed to describe it specifically, there are so many ways: the ocean, lapis lazuli, the sky, someone's eyes. Our definitions are as different as we are ourselves.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

Color, Way

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Personality, Funny

“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Random Thoughts http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell101705.asp, Oct. 17, 2005 2000s

People, Education, Way, Feeling

“maybe he's falling in love with the idea of falling in love with me. Maybe he wants to be in love with someone and I've ended up in the right place at the right time.”

Candace Bushnell book Summer and the City

Source: Summer and the City

Love, Time

“But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.”

Jim Butcher book Grave Peril

Source: Grave Peril

God, People, Way, Understanding

“I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”

Tom Schulman (1950) American film director, screenwriter

Variant: No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world
Source: Dead Poets Society

World, Change, Business

“Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.”

Mike Royko (1932–1997) American writer and newspaper columnist

Smile

“The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Age of Reason

Source: The Age of Reason

Thinking, Personality

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4

“Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up ’cause they’re looking for ideas.”

Paula Poundstone (1959) American comedian

“I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.”

Jeff Lindsay (1952) American playwright and crime novelist Jeffry P. Freundlich

Source: Dexter By Design

“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”

Mina Loy (1882–1966) Futurist poet and actress

Source: The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy

Music

“I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie We Should All Be Feminists

Source: We Should All Be Feminists

History

“With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth… But we as gardeners, must beware… for some seeds are the seeds of ruin… and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Science

“He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

Life, Death, Smile, Time

“Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.”

Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?”

Bob Hope (1903–2003) American comedian, actor, singer and dancer

Love, Fashion, Thinking, Waiting

“I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) German film director, screenwriter, and actor

Love, Life, Search, Personality

“When did you get all insightful?" he asked.
"I have no idea," Josh admitted.
"I don't like it."
"Me, either. Makes me feel like a girl. Don't tell anyone."

(Ethan and Josh)”

Susan Mallery (1950) American author

Source: Almost Perfect

Feeling, Girl

“Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”

Patrick O'Brian The Hundred Days

Source: The Hundred Days

“The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 2, Apert
Source: Anathem (2008)

“For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Lovers

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Source: An Autobiography

Children, School

“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Dreams, Waiting

“I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

People

“Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“I know I have to stop. We all have to stop. Funny how knowing something's a bad idea doesn't make a difference.”

Sara Ryan (1971) American writer

Source: The Rules for Hearts

“If I lose control, you'll be the first to know."
"I'm quite perturbed by the idea.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

People, Music, Thinking, Reading

“Why do all your brilliant ideas involve felonies?”

Kathy Reichs Virals

Source: Virals

“Ideas shape the course of history.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

As quoted in The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival (1976) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 97
Attributed

History

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)
Context: Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

History, Intelligence, Time