Quotes About Ideas

The story of practically every great fortune starts with the day when a creator of ideas and a seller of ideas got together and worked in harmony. Carnegie surrounded himself with men who could do all that he could not do—men who created ideas, and men who put ideas into operation—and made himself and the others fabulously rich.

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently , for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative. Ideas come and go, stories stay.

For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise.

My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like recognition and credit warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry.

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors—as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind.

If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.

Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.

behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution. Strange as it sounds, this point has only been discovered very recently (we will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally; we are merely fit for the maximum probability of transmitting our genes in some given unsophisticated environment).

once asked Einstein if he carried a notebook to write down ideas. "I never have ideas" was the reply

La persona a quien se atribuye la difusión de esta idea del semiescepticismo tendencioso es sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper, posiblemente el único filósofo de la ciencia a quien leen y de quien hablan los actores del mundo real (aunque es posible que los filósofos profesionales no lo hagan con tanto entusiasmo).

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists—or anyone.

As shown from the track record of the prophets: before you are proven right, you will be reviled; after you are proven right, you will be hated for a while, or, what's worse, your ideas will appear to be "trivial" thanks to retrospective distortion.

An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly

they would not buy my ideas on robust risk management because "everyone uses these textbooks.

My paternal uncle was not too bothered by my political ideas (these

Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas;