Quotes About Ideas

You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

Entrer chez les gens pour déconcerter leurs idées, leur faire la surprise d'être surpris de ce qu'ils font, de ce qu'ils pensent, et qu'ils n'ont jamais conçu différent, c'est, au moyen de l'ingénuité feinte ou réelle, donner à ressentir toute la relativité d'une civilisation, d'une confiance habituelle dans l'ordre établi.

Les 'idées' sont pour moi des moyens de transformation - et par conséquent, des parties ou moments de quelque changement. Une 'idée' de l'homme 'est un moyen de transformer une question'.

Because that's what fantasy is, isn't it?" he demanded. "Not just making things up, but taking ideas and giving them hands and feet and claws and teeth!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person's "depositing" ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be "consumed" by the discussants. Nor yet is it a hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth.

Every idea is my last. I feel sure of it. So, I try to do the best with each as it comes and that's where my responsibility ends. But I just don't wait for ideas. I look for them. Constantly. And if I don't use the ideas that I find, they're going to quit showing up.

Proselytizing is a moral imperative and feeds the marketplace of ideas. I want to hear everyone tell the truth as they see it. I want to learn from everyone.

Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all.

Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.

To reach out for another is – to risk involvement. To expose feelings is – to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas, your dreams before the crowd is – to risk their loss. To love is – to risk not being loved in return.

two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics.

Certainly for many people the most intense music is the music of the spheres—the perception of built-in coherence in nature—and that is the music of pure ideas. We

If you are trying to be inventive and come up with lots of interesting new ideas, it's usually the worst thing in the world if someone comes along and starts being critical. Thus, the power of brainstorming: no one is allowed to criticize any idea or suggestion that is offered—no matter how stupid, impractical, or useless it seems. You can't get the good ones and the fruitful interaction among the odd ones unless you welcome the terrible ones.

Most people start shaping and revising what they have written once they get one pretty good idea. "Yes that's it, now I've figured out what I want to say." That's terrible. You shouldn't start revising till you have more good stuff than you can use. (And it won't take long to get it if you make your early writing into a free brainstorming session.) That way you'll have to be critical and throw away genuinely good stuff just to trim your piece down to the right length.

Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God, the God within our control, the God who moves in our circles, the God who agrees with us.

Many philosophers in the English-speaking world felt vindicated by the Sokal hoax. Although English-speaking philosophy had produced radical ideas about science, for the most part it had not accepted postmodernism and other French-influenced literary-philosophical movements.

Leadership is ultimately about leverage. Effective leaders leverage themselves—their ideas, energy, relationships, and influence—to create new patterns in organizations.

When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard Him were astonished. “Where did this man get these ideas?” they asked. “What is this wisdom He has been given? And how can He perform such miracles?

Now all the Athenians and foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing more than hearing and articulating new ideas.