Idea Quotes

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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Walter Benjamin

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

... it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Randall Jarrell

To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you don't need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.

W. Clement Stone

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off.

The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.

Henry Morton Stanley

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Stéphane Mallarmé

The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

Margaret Caroline Anderson

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.

We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take, therefore, the form of distinction for the form.

G. Spencer-Brown

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.

Ramana Maharshi