Quotes About Ideas

In recognition that any good idea is a fragile thing, you have to give it a few minutes to breath—like a good red wine.

Writing is essential to learning. One cannot be educated and yet unable to communicate one's ideas in written form.

My dear boy, your thinking has no structure, no foundation. You pick up your primary ideas from TV shows. You're like a fart in the bathtub. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']

The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

A man isn't a collection of chemical reactions, he is a collection of ideas.

You!" "Uh huh. Me. Old calm-as-a-cat Felix. It's going to take hold, I tell you. It's going to be popular. We'll sell permissions to view it physically and then all sorts of lesser rights—direct pick-up, recording, and so forth. Smith has a lot of ideas about identifying various combinations with cities and organizations and attaching color symbols to them and songs and things. He's full of ideas—an amazing young man, for a barbarian.

I do not dare assert that the one is actually a conscious mind in the same way that each of us is a conscious mind. It is found through the unconscious, and unconscious it probably is in essence. I can understand why many, bowled over by this experience, call it God, but I still feel that all ideas of God are only symbols of the experience itself.

My good friend Joel Fort, M.D., a rare bird who is both a psychiatrist and a sociologist, repeatedly tells me, when I recount such tales to him, that there is no scientific proof of cause-and-effect LSD influence in these transformations. "There is no proof," he repeats, "that a drug alone causes such changes. All the evidence suggests, rather, that the ideas that are fashionable in the drug-using world are the causative factor in such conversions.

I am merely trying to show that, in the present primitive condition of this backward planet, we are still governed by imprinting and conditioning — that all of us, like Mr. Gardner and Mr. Randi, find it literally impossible to think, even for a nanosecond, about certain ideas — that you and I think we are more tolerant than Mr. Randi or Mr. Gardner until we confront that which is strictly intolerable for us —

Magic encourages you to take charge of your own life, so it confers a sense of agency and self-control that can seem lacking at times like these when sort of epic, elemental forces seem to have us all at their mercy. Given the options, who wouldn't prefer to be rampaging around in higher planes, interacting with eternal archetypes and pop culture gods? Who wouldn't want to bring back ideas that could change the world?

Somebody's helping you and you have to take time off to listen to them and pretend you think their ideas are great and come up with an answer that makes them feel good

it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.

The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in the impenetrable gloom of eternal oblivion.

The people with money were meddling in mechanical and design affairs. They were interjecting their mediocre ideas into the process and polluting it.

To help yourself to cultivate serendipity, you should keep a notebook with you at all times. The moment any idea or observation comes, you note it down. You keep the notebook by your bed, careful to record ideas that come in those moments of fringe awareness—just before falling asleep, or just upon waking.

On the internet, it is easy to find studies that support both sides of an argument. In general, you should never accept the validity of people's ideas because they have supplied "evidence." Instead, examine the evidence yourself in the cold light of day, with as much skepticism as you can muster. Your first impulse should always be to find the evidence that disconfirms your most cherished beliefs and those of others. That is true science.

I'll never use force to try to make my enemies think the way I think, George - partly because I don't believe in it, and partly because it's useless. You can't destroy ideas by force, and you can't hide 'em by silence.

When we first trained people to deal with ability problems, it all seemed so simple. You ask others for their ideas, you get to hear their best thoughts, and they feel empowered. What could be easier? Who could possibly mess this up? As it turns out, there are several ways to go wrong. Here are the top three things not to do.

Here's why gifted communicators keep a close eye on safety. Dialogue calls for the free flow of meaning—period. And nothing kills the flow of meaning like fear. When you fear that people aren't buying into your ideas, you start pushing too hard. When you fear that you may be harmed in some way, you start withdrawing and hiding.

It is appropriate for the "men of Issachar" to strive to "understand the times" and do battle with those ideas that corrupt the world (1 Chron. 12:32, 2 Cor. 10:4-5). On the other hand, the Christian reader must consciously hold the ideas at arm's length, so as not to commune with the unfruitful works of darkness, or meditate long and hard on things that are not true, not lovely, and not pure (Phil. 4:8).

What is truth but to live for an idea?

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too.

lawmakers are often lawyers themselves, notoriously bereft of ideas.