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Topics/Thinking

Quotes about ideas

115 quotes from 89 people

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I believe that faith is a precursor of all our ideas.
Charlie Chaplin1889–1977My Autobiography (1964), p. 291
- Faith
I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie1890–1976An Autobiography (1977), Part III: Growing Up, §II
- Work
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill1874–1965Speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943 (full text, audio).
- Knowledge
A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
Winston Churchill1874–1965“The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)”, radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938).
- Power
There’s nothing that’s ever happened in the world that didn’t start in one human mind.
Tom Clancy1947–2013In Depth with Tom Clancy (2002)
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Jean Cocteau1889–1963Diary of an Unknown (1988)
It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.
Calvin Coolidge1872–1933From ‘Address at Holy Cross’ (25 June 1919), published in Have Faith In Massachusetts: A Collection of Speeches and Messages (2nd Ed.), Coolidge, Houghton Mifflin, p. 231.
- Knowledge
It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them.
Philip K. Dick1928–1982“Philip K Dick speech (interpreter edited out) in Metz, France, 1977”, ~28:00
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.
Paul Dirac1902–1984The scientific work of Georges Lemaître (1968), P.A.M
- Science
Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
Walt Disney1901–1966The Quotable Walt Disney (2001)
- Entertainment
There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881
- War & Peace
Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881
One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature
Arthur Conan Doyle1859–1930A Study in Scarlet (1887), Part I, Chapter VIn context
- Nature
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
Will Durant1885–1981And Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.
Bob Dylanborn 1941The Guardian (13 February 1992)
- Music