Quotes About Ideas

A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki - it's more valuable than e-mail for running a company - and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.

Certainly to me it has been valuable to have to think through the basics of physics in order to present them in a halfway coherent form for a course. That has led me to ideas in research. Even freshman physics leads to thoughts that lead to other thoughts that are stimulating.

I do think that I'm a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren't consciously thinking of them, I think they simmer. You're working on them, even if you don't know you're working on them, and I think having something in your head for a while is a valuable thing.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random.

Some people think that my shows are just for shock value, but the provocation makes those classic pieces look different every six months. You don't need to see the same gray suit every season. But surrounding it with 40 really interesting ideas makes it feel new.

The ideal is to build a culture of healthy discussion, where everyone's ideas are valued. At KIND, we want everyone to be comfortable challenging my or anyone else's ideas without ever feeling or making someone else feel that the questioning is a personal attack.

The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents.

Allende had good ideas, but he executed them poorly. Although he correctly recognized Chile's problems, he adopted wrong solutions to those problems.

the measure of a person was her ideas

Most of Mycroft's ideas were far too dangerous to even think about, much less let loose on a world unprepared for hyper-radical thought.

For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.

All our current media concerns have in French the suffix '-aire': identitaire (issues of identity), sanitaire (health concerns), securitaire ('law and order'), humanitaire (humanitarianism). The whole lot being publicitaire (promotional). There is in this suffix something which quite aptly characterizes our culture as funerarium of received ideas and single-track thinking.

The fragment is like a broken mirror - ideas don't have the time to reflect themselves in it or, as a result, to feel sorry for themselves. They run ahead of their shadows or their reflections. To run ahead is to move towards an unforeseeable outcome, but one whose path is made for it in advance. Birds too run ahead of those who see them. The event also runs ahead of history. It is what opens up untimely perspectives in a world brought totally up to date.

We can bear ideas and events only when laundered by commentary, like the dirty money concealed by banking secrecy. 'In the heart and the belly it continues to sing its poisonous song - Better to kill a child than to harbour unsatisfied desires within oneself' (Kenzaburo Oe). Ressentiment is an empty, useless passion only if it assumes a sentimental form.

The problem of reference was already an almost insoluble one: how is it with the real? How is it with representation? But when, with the Virtual, the referent disappears, when it disappears into the technical programming of the image, when there is no longer the situation of the real world set over against a light-sensitive film (it is the same with language, which is like the sensitive film of ideas), then there is, ultimately, no possible representation any more.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

Sometimes things that seem like good ideas in theory, in practice turn out to be the worst kinds of boneheaded blunders.

I've always thought there was a kind of beauty to it, the way narratives get told and retold. It's how stories survive through the ages. You can follow an idea from one author's work to another, and to me that's something I find powerful and exciting.

But as more memories built up, crowding and enlarging the storage capacity of their brain, changes came harder. There was no more room for new ideas that would be added to their memory bank, their heads were already too large. Women had difficulty giving birth; they couldn't afford new knowledge that would enlarge their heads even more.

The trouble with adults is that they never believe kids can do something even when they have good ideas.

Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.