Ideas Quotes

If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.

~ Graceanne A. Decandido

There are so many things we do in life that define the real meaning of our lives. There are so many ideas that come to us each moment of time. There are so many things we conceive each day which give birth to things that define who we are and how we are living life. Everybody knows something and everybody thinks about something! A true value of our lives is not just in what we conceive each moment of time, but also in how we nurture and give life to what we conceive, against all odds, to give birth to something that defines who we are and who we become in the end!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the way they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols.

~ James Davison Hunter

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about

~ Rex Stout

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The way it feels to me,' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.

~ Michael Lewis

Act NOW on those ideas! As they say, you snooze you lose. Or as I say, if you BEGIN you WIN.

~ Richie Norton

As we go through life, we essentially grow a personality. Our personality branches out in many directions to assist us organize our thoughts, feelings, values, ideas, and coping mechanisms. Our exhibited behavior – the way we organize and deal with life – becomes an external representation of our central self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The point is, the best technology or idea doesn't always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.

~ Eric Weiner

Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up to my pores during the day, and at night - in the moments before I pass off into sleep - ideas explode into my head like fireworks.

~ Daniel Keyes

In all well-organised brains, the predominating idea—and there always is one—is sure to be the last thought before sleeping, and the first upon waking in the morning. Andrea had scarcely opened his eyes when his predominating idea presented itself, and whispered in his ear that he had slept too long.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

~ Jill Lepore

Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.

~ Derek Thompson

I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities of all the intelligent races in the galaxy - tying them together, building common traditions... The notion strikes me as kind of fine.

~ Roger Zelazny

Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.

~ Henry A. Giroux

[The Internet] affects democracy... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy.

~ Lawrence Lessig

The more degrees of freedom there are in practice, the wider the discussion and debate can be.

~ Thomas Newkirk

We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion...What is to-day a matter of academic speculation, begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires.

~ J. Gresham Machen

When we talk about the theology of 'God is Dead,' this means that the notion of God must be dead in order for God to reveal himself as a reality. The theologians, if they only use concepts, and not direct experience, are not very helpful. The same goes for nirvana, which is something to be touched and lived and not discussed and described. We have notions that distort truth, reality. A Zen master said the following to a large assembly: 'My friends, every time I use the word Buddha, I suffer. I am allergic to it. Every time I do it, I have to go to the bathroom and rinse my mouth three times in succession.' He said this in order to help his disciples not to get caught up in the notion of Buddha. The Buddha is one thing, but the notion of Buddha is another.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

This is the way to get ideas: never to let adverse circumstances discourage you, but to believe there is a way out of every difficulty, which may be found by earnest though.

~ L. Frank Baum

Your ideas about possession must increase until you get to a state of full possession of the land, city and nation

~ Sunday Adelaja

Mediocrity is Death.

~ Suleman Abdullah

Don’t just hope the big idea is going to come, make it happen

~ Simon Dunn

Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.

~ Sarah J. Maas

Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.

~ Alan Moore

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

~ Steve Jobs

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

~ Ayn Rand

There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

~ Alan Moore

I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.

~ Cornel West

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.

~ John Maynard Keynes

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

~ Chuck Klosterman

Chance favors the connected mind.

~ Steven Johnson

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

~ Albert Camus

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely, but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

~ Mark Twain

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit

~ Neil Gaiman

Some ideas are not born of logic and good sense. They are made of clouds and cobwebs. They sprout from nowhere and feed on excitement, sprinkled with adventure juice and the sweet flavor of the forbidden. The psyche moves from the realms of the ordinary and takes a delicate step towards the unknown. We know we shouldn't and that is exactly why we do.

~ Brigid Lowry

We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.

~ Charles De Lint

I wonder where you got that idea from? I mean, the idea that it's feeble to change your mind once it's made up. That's a wrong idea, you know. Make up your mind about things, by all means - but if something happens to show that you are wrong, then it is feeble not to change your mind, Elizabeth. Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.

~ Enid Blyton