quotations about ideas
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Crack Up"
Libraries were full of ideas--perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.
SARAH J. MAAS
Throne of Glass
A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
The Future of Ideas
In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture
The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Ideas generate ideas; like a potato, which, cut in pieces, reproduces itself in a multiplied form.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
I try not to do anything that's too close to what I've done before. And the nice thing is we have a big universe here. It's filled with new ideas. All you have to do is grab them.
STAN LEE
Brandweek, May 2000, May 2000
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
WALTER LIPPMAN
A Preface to Politics
Great trees are of slow growth; and great ideas have to be before the mind and in the heart a long time before they are sufficiently familiar to have the face of friends.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
HOWARD H. AIKEN
attributed, Portraits in Silicon
Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
A man is not clever simply because he has many ideas, just as he is not necessarily a good general because he has many soldiers.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET
The Blacks
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
The collision of a great man with a great idea strikes fire in dry flax.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
The mere presentation of an idea, unless we are careful about it, or unless there is within some unusual resistance, makes us believe it; and this is why the belief of others adds to our belief so quickly, for no ideas seem so very clear as those inculcated on us from every side.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics