Idea Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If the aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored races of the Earth, I for one should only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of mankind.

George Edward Woodberry

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Harold Macmillan

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is … governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.

John von Neumann

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

Fernando Pessoa

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

Giuseppe Mazzini

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty.... but only vaguely. At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.

Camille Pissarro

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.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

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

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

We do not support the man. We do not support the individual. We support the idea of independent revolution in the Western Hemisphere, free from American intervention

Lee Harvey Oswald

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

Antoine de Rivarol

Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth.

Phyllis Schlafly

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.