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Idea Quotes
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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
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Emptiness the starting point. — In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup. My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty.
Bruce Lee
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The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke.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
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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.
Isaac Newton
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I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.
Voltaire
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If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by wind and spry together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Certainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself.
Helen Keller
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As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.
Mark Twain
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We find it difficult to choose our direction because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
Henry David Thoreau
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Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.
John Locke
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You have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. … Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.
Charles Darwin
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Ideas are like everything else. They've got to be marketed.
Agatha Christie
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When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.
Ernest Hemingway
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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?
C. S. Lewis
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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
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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
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A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written
Isaac Asimov
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He could charm an audience an hour on a stretch without ever getting rid of an idea.
Mark Twain
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What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
Stephen King
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The idea of mathematics is the idea of science in general.
Novalis
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Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two foci. Facts are one, ideas are the other.
Victor Hugo
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These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
C. S. Lewis
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I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindu theology,... but the difficulties were too great.
Mark Twain
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When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.
Winston Churchill
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The State is the curse of the individual... The State must go! That will be a revolution which will find me on its side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which will be something worth possessing.
Henrik Ibsen
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Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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