Quotes about ideas and thoughts

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“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”

“You're in America now," I said. "Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you'd prefer.”

“The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.”

“Words, madmoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.”

“Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.”

“Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

“The secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself.”

“We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.”

“For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write”

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.”

“It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.”

“Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.”

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

“He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.”

“But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, 'She's nothing to you', the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.”

“Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: “It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.”

“Why is a raven like a writing desk? - Mad Hatter
I haven't the slightest idea. - Alice”

“Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.”

“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”

“Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.”

“Investigation?" Isabelle laughed. "Now we're detectives? Maybe we should all have code names."
"Good idea," said Jace. "I shall be Baron Hotschaft Von Hugenstein.”

“People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.”

“Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.”

“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”

“Bursar?"
"Yes, Archchancellor?"
"You ain't a member of some secret society or somethin', are you?"
"Me? No, Archchancellor."
"Then it'd be a damn good idea to take your underpants off your head.”

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”

“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”

“If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”

“All great ideas are dangerous.”

“You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman… I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage…

Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?”

“Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.”

“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness […] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find […] a being which immediately recognises itself, […] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”

“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.”

“After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”

“Love is pretty much a decision anyway. Just like happiness. You can decide to either love someone or not, be happy or not. The rest is just commitment to the idea.”

“When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”

“Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her."
"Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.”

“Mother told me once that some Westonians privately criticised Dad for retreating so soon. They apparently felt it would have been more dignified to have waited a week or so before running away. I think this view misses the essential point of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, “Let’s run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.”

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”

“Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue in New Orleans on Mardi Gras = bad idea!”

“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”

“Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind.”

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

“His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.”

“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

“beware of ideas…”

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

“Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

“I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite.”

“I have an idea that the phrase “weaker sex” was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.”

“You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.”

“I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”

“Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.”

“My idea of an agreeable person," said Hugo Bohun, "is a person who agrees with me.”

“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.”

“Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year”

“I don't know. I don't know at all. And that's what's frightening the life out of me. To have no idea….”

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.”

“It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.”

“The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.”

“Everyone is in love with his own ideas”

“It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.”

“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”

“The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.”

“There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.”

“I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news… if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.”

“Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.”

“Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.”

“In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”

“The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming — what should I do? — with an answer taking shape: nothing.”

“Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.”

“Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.”

“He doesn't need my help coming up with pranks. He's got too many ideas of his own.
- Daja referring to Briar in their first year at Discipline cottage”

“Jumping out a window five hundred feet above ground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when I'm wearing bronze wings and flapping my arms like a duck.”

“Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you'll never know where you'll get an idea from…”

“The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.”

“It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.”

“Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

“Are you stalking me, Mr. Fulton?" The idea both amused and horrified Jazz.”

“Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous.”

“You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.”

“As we ask God for some blessing, we have an obligation to participate ourselves in the fulfillment of those dreams, aspirations, hopes, and ideas.”

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”

“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things… I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas”

“Every development of truths which relate to human nature, and more especially its active manifestations, is attended with a wish to see worked out in practice what theory has shown us to be just and good. To man, whose mind is seldom satisfied with the calmly beneficent influence of abstract ideas, this desire is perfectly natural, and it increases in liveliness with the spirit of benevolent sympathy in social happiness and well-being. But, however natural in itself, and however noble in its origin, this desire has not unfrequently led to hurtful consequences,—nay, often to greater evils than the colder indifference, or (as from the very opposite cause the same effect may follow) the glowing enthusiasm, which, comparatively heedless of reality, delights only in the pure beauty of ideas.”

“The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.”

“The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.”

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness..”

“The sieges of Gvozdansko (1578) and Alamo (1836) tell the true stories of the small bands of the heroes who stood against the massive armies to defend their homelands. They echo innate human devotion to the idea of fighting for freedom.”

“Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental----indeed foundational----fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations. Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism.”

“Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob. As I said, Batman was a combination of Fairbanks and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn't have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That's how Robin came to be. Bob called me over and said he was going to put a boy in the strip to identify with Batman. I thought it was a great idea”

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

“And freedom will win -- not because it’s inevitable, not because it is ordained, but because these basic human yearnings for dignity and justice and democracy do not go away. They can be suppressed. At times, they can be silenced, but they burn in every human heart in a place where no regime could ever reach, a light that no army can ever extinguish. And so long as free peoples summon the confidence and the courage and the will to defend the values that we cherish, then freedom will always be stronger and our ideas will always prevail no matter what.”

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they’re defeated by better ideas -- a more attractive and compelling vision.”

“We must promote the idea of secession. Or more specifically, we must promote the idea of a world composed of tens of thousands of distinct districts, regions, and cantons, and hundred of thousands of independent free cities such as the present day oddities of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Greatly increased opportunities for economically motivated migration would thus result, and the world would be one of small [classically] liberal governments economically integrated through free trade and an international commodity money such as gold.”

“But do these people never come up with the idea that I might be artificial by nature?”