Ideas

Ideas

Albert Einstein:
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Bill Moyers:
Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
David Bohm:
Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.
Don Marquis:
If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
Dorothy Thompson:
The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.
Edward R. Murrow:
Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
Ella Fitzgerald:
It isn’t where you come from, it’s where you’re going that counts.
George Bernard Shaw:
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Santayana:
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
Immanuel Kant:
Intuition and concepts constitute … the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.
Jean Goss:
All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.
John Erskine:
I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.
Lama Surya Das:
Our lack of compassion stems from our inability to see deeply into the nature of things.
Linus Pauling:
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Mark Twain:
If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.
Medgar Evers:
You can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.
Sydney J. Harris:
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Terry Pratchett:
I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
Theodore Parker:
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker — it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.
Victor Hugo:
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.