Ideas Quotes and Sayings

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more.
Henry Ward Beecher

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas . . . If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you . . . On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones.
Carl Sagan

Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
Walt Disney

A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.
Andy Goldsworthy

Working in the context of ultra-famous brands like Dior and Vuitton, creative spirits are always going to feel reined in. It’s important that they are free to develop ideas. And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It’s not a big investment.
Bernard Arnault

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?
Dale Carnegie

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz

When the idea came up, I said, “Are you crazy? Stick my face on the label of salad dressing?” And then, of course, we got the whole idea of exploitation and how circular it is. Why not, really, go to the fullest length, and the silliest length, in exploiting yourself and turn the proceeds back to the community?
Paul Newman

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.
Emile Chartier

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Sir Barnett Cocks

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas

Ideas have become far more important to us than action - ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present - that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.
J. Krishnamurti

The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker — it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.
Theodore Parker

British fashion is self confident and fearless. It refuses to bow to commerce, thus generating a constant flow of new ideas whilst drawing in British heritage.
Alexander McQueen

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative. The jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
Walter Lippmann

Have you any idea how many kids it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen? Three. It takes one to say, “What light?” and two more to say, “I didn’t turn it on.”
Erma Bombeck

Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.
David Bohm