Idea Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will.... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religious men are and must be heretics now — for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand — or think of God but with a prearranged idea.

Florence Nightingale

On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far a this is
simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And, accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and exist without it.

René Descartes

He had never seen a woman doctor before, and his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea. He could not recall any biblical injunction that the man should remain ever the doctor and the woman the nurse, and yet he felt as if a blasphemy had been committed.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not easy to talk about how I reached the idea of the theory of relativity; there were so many hidden complexities to motivate my thought, and the impact of each thought was different at different stages in the development of the idea.

Albert Einstein

And this which you deem of no moment is the very highest of all: that is whether you have a right idea of the gods, whereby you may live your life well or ill.

People often... have no idea how fair the flower is to the touch, nor do they appreciate its fragrance, which is the soul of the flower.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.

So I'm unequivocal on this. If somebody is a law-abiding citizen who is going about their business, and working in a job, an obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things that good citizens are supposed to do, and not harming anybody — the idea that they are going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong. Full stop. And the state does not need to weigh in on religious doctrine. The state just has to say we're going to treat everybody equally under the law. And then everybody else can have their own opinions.

The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes.

Albert Einstein

As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.

Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you?

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.

G. K. Chesterton

No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.

George Bernard Shaw

We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin — a little fellow trying to do the best he could.

Gordon and his friends had quite an exciting time with their 'subversive ideas'. For a whole year they ran an unofficial monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with jellygraph. It advocated Socialism, free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy, and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Bertrand Russell

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In a hundred years time, perhaps, a great man will appear who may offer them (the Germans) a chance at salvation. He'll take me as a model, use my ideas, and follow the course I have charted.

In addition to the leadership of the Party, a decisive factor is our population of 600 million. More people mean a greater ferment of ideas, more enthusiasm and more energy. Never before have the masses of the people been so inspired, so militant and so daring as at present.