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Quotes about ideas

115 quotes from 89 people

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A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Marcel Proust1871–1922
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt1884–1962
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
Salman Rushdieborn 1947Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)
- Anti-Religion
In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.
Carl Sagan1934–1996Broca’s Brain (1979), Chapter 25, “The Amniotic Universe” (p. 364)
- Fear
The best ideas are common property.
Seneca the Younger5 BC–AD 65Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XII: On old age, Line 11.
- Quotations
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Introduction to the 1831 edition of FrankensteinIn context
Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
Thomas Sowellborn 1930Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 1 : The Role of Knowledge
- Knowledge
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck1902–1968Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man.
John Steinbeck1902–1968East of Eden (1952), Part 2, Ch. 13. i
Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
John Steinbeck1902–1968East of Eden (1952), Part 2, Ch. 13. i
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?
Harriet Beecher Stowe1811–1896Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Volume II, Chapter XXXVIIIIn context
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
Nassim Nicholas Talebborn 1960The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 3
This world is but canvas to our imaginations.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Wednesday
The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.
Alexis de Tocqueville1805–1859Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One, Chapter XVI.
- Democracy
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Mark Twain1835–1910Following the Equator (1897), Ch. 32.