Quotes About Ideas

Knowing too much about a subject can make us overly cautious. Having a lot of conventional wisdom may make us doubt our own hunches and intuition because we're more likely to think that any seemingly good ideas that pop into our heads are wrong if they don't square with what we've previously learned.

history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.

The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.

mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond

The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.

The phrases 'certainty is an illusion' and 'think probabilistically about the world', both introduced in the first class, are the first two examples of high-level concepts which Dan calls airport ideas.

Those Greeks and Romans," he protested, "they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me.

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously.

Nowadays, it's almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom – at least in the abstract (in practice, of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions.

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

That [Chester Bowles's] ideas seemed to be a little unfashionable did not bother him. He simply did not take the Russian threat that seriously; he thought the real dangers in the world were those of poverty and hunger. To many liberals he was a comforting throwback to the Roosevelt era; he still stood for things that they believed in but which had recently come under considerable attack.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

The science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences. [All the other sciences] have a relation, greater or lesser, to human nature. 'Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and could explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reason.

our minds can create new ideas from the components which experience has already given us, by combining together our existing ideas in new ways or by shuffling the components of our existing ideas, but we are quite unable to form any completely new ideas beyond those that have already been given to us by sensation or feeling.

Nothing is more admirable, than the readiness, with which the imagination suggests its ideas, and presents them at the very instant, in which they become necessary or useful.

By the term 'impression', then, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or feel or love or hate or desire or will. These are to be distinguished from ideas, which are the fainter perceptions of which we are conscious when we reflect on our impressions.

A very material question has been started concerning ABSTRACT or GENERAL ideas, WHETHER THEY BE GENERAL OR PARTICULAR IN THE MIND'S CONCEPTION OF THEM. A great philosopher [Dr. Berkeley.] has disputed the received opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them.

Thus if instead of saying, that in war the weaker have always recourse to negotiation, we should say, that they have always recourse to conquest, the custom, which we have acquired of attributing certain relations to ideas, still follows the words, and makes us immediately perceive the absurdity of that proposition; in the same manner as one particular idea may serve us in reasoning concerning other ideas, however different from it in several circumstances.

Belief doesn't consists in any special nature or order of ideas ·because the imagination has no limits with respect to those·, but rather in the manner of their conception and in their feeling to the mind. [...] In philosophy we can go no further than to assert that belief is something felt by the mind that distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.

Truth is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the proportions of ideas, consider'd as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence (Hume, 1739, p. 495).

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS.

Believe Big. The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. Remember this, too! Big ideas and big plans are often easier -- certainly no more difficult -- than small ideas and small plans.

As we are accustomed to acknowledging what we cannot see, the idea of God seems less strange. Nonphysical things are real; they are the stuff of life. Our lives pivot on real things that are non-material: ideas, emotions, imagination, memory, relationships, intuition, suffering, joy, and faith. To believe only in what you can see seems a peculiar form of blindness.

It wasn't just escapism, he persuaded himself. Sometimes the best ideas occur to you while your mind is occupied with something completely different. Pieces of the puzzle can suddenly fall into place.