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"
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
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
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
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
Libraries were full of ideas--perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.
SARAH J. MAAS
Throne of Glass
Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
I expose myself to life, and from that, ideas come as a surprise. I totally dismiss the ones that are pleasant and easy. I'm only interested in the ones that really disturb me and that I get obsessed about. They're what bring me to new territory.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Life's Work: An Interview with Marina Abramovic", Harvard Business Review, November 2016
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
The collision of a great man with a great idea strikes fire in dry flax.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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 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
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET
The Blacks
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
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
Ideas generate ideas; like a potato, which, cut in pieces, reproduces itself in a multiplied form.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
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