Top 100 Idea Quotes
#1. 'Freedom.' He pauses a moment to reflect on the F-word. 'Sometimes I think it's an idea that enslaves us. We're never free from hungering for the notion that we can even have freedom. When perhaps it's the very idea of it that causes us to suffer.
Rachel Cohn
#2. Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.
Ad Reinhardt
#3. I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me.
Bruce Springsteen
#4. A fact acquires its true and full value only through the idea which is developed from it.
Justus Von Liebig
#5. My work is very carefully researched. Sometimes I have to ditch an idea because I can't prove it.
Kerry Greenwood
#6. An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence
Christopher Hitchens
#7. For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.
Bill Bryson
#8. I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.
Jane Austen
#9. I think there's this idea that lipstick is something quite old or something you'd only wear at night.
Emma Watson
#10. There's something about the superheroes and the idea behind their relationship with humans, whether it's a metaphor for the better part of ourselves, or the more flawed part of ourselves. So it seems to really be our own pop-culture version of Greek mythology.
Clark Gregg
#11. I thought I had a talent for alienating people, but I have no idea what it is that doesn't go over.
Nellie McKay
#12. The idea that I am cynical because I'm writing the books that I write is a bit like someone saying, 'What, you've done a second album? Oh, I see, cashing in on your first album, are you?' But I'm a musician! It's sort of what I do.
Ben Schott
#13. Insofar as some concept of cause and effect is inherent in narrative, then, the divine must make its appearance; arguably it is not until Thucydides that the idea of a sustained narrative without the divine is born.
Robert L. Fowler
#14. Adultery can indeed be pleasant, and tying one on can amuse. But betrayal, jealousy, love grown cold, and the gray dawn of the morning after are nobody's idea of a good time.
Robert Farrar Capon
#15. The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.
Maria Montessori
#16. They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.
Constantin Brancusi
#17. Your idea of love is rather primitive. It's not a series of sensations, independent of each other ... It's something different ... a sense of loss ...
Francoise Sagan
#18. I think that when we start thought-policing people and idea-policing people, then that's crossing a line. And I think, you know, everybody's so afraid of this imaginary line of thought police that they forget their own personal safety.
Ashton Kutcher
#19. Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.
Charlotte Bronte
#20. We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other's garde.
Tom Robbins
#21. Rock Hudson let his gay agent marry him off to his secretary because he didn't want people to get the right idea.
Anthony Perkins
#22. What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?
Richard Dawkins
#23. Aunt B walked out onto the helipad wearing loose yoga pants. "I'm just here to stretch. Kate, want to help?"
"Sure."
Thirty seconds later, as I was flying through the air, I decided that this wasn't the best idea.
Ilona Andrews
#24. The idea of directing was something that I always had in the back of my mind, and writing as well. I began to write screenplays when I was in my 20's.
Charles Martin Smith
#25. Rosa leaned forward. 'We don't have the least idea what life can be.'
'We don't?'
'No.'
'Then how do we find out?'
Rosa wiped tears from Dante's face with her fingers. The gesture was firm as it was tender. 'We plunge.
Carolina De Robertis
#26. A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.
Sally Schneider
#27. I remember stepping off and thinking that it might not be a good idea to let anyone know that I'm a homosexual, which is hilarious because I'm probably the gayest man I know. I had these huge dreams and they came to fruition so quickly.
Leslie Jordan
#28. The idea that talent is directly proportional to your trophy cabinet is one I oppose.
Alex Turner
#29. The idea of eternity lives in all of us. We thirst to live in a belief which raises our small personality to a higher coherence - a coherence which is human and yet superhuman, absolute and yet steadily growing and developing, ideal and yet real.
Christian Lous Lange
#30. In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was.
Dai Sijie
#31. It's just not a good idea to drink and drive; that is just common sense. But common sense is not that common!
Madeline Zima
#32. It's not that I'm particularly shy but I just don't like the idea of publicising myself as a celebrity.
Skandar Keynes
#33. It's an amazing feeling to feel that I was able to get a personal connection to the work, through the work of it. But I like the idea that I was able to tell a bunch of people's stories even though I didn't know them.
Azazel Jacobs
#34. Worlds of my own creation are erected with walls that are within but a few scant paces of each other. The world that God creates for me has no idea what walls are.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#35. A choreographic idea flows only as fast as the initiator can communicate it to bodies and see them realize it.
Marcia Siegel
#36. When I was younger, I enjoyed being strong, and I loved it when my heart was very strong, but I think it was also about submitting to the cultural idea that if you're a 22-year-old woman, you have to look a certain way. I'm not into that anymore. But I do appreciate it when my clothes fit.
Jennifer Beals
#37. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.
Amy Chua
#39. What is it with you and time capsules?"
"I like the idea of a permanent record," he explains. "Something to say, This Is Who I Am, even when I'm not that person anymore...
Harriet Reuter Hapgood
#40. It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.
Germaine Greer
#41. The dramas for me allow me to explore more behavioral, deeper psychological things. But the comedies obviously allow me to explore the idea of really working off other people. I'm having more fun doing that.
Robin Williams
#42. I had no idea what awaited me when I took a job with CBS Records, and it was a total surprise to find I had a gift and an ear for music.
Clive Davis
#43. A drawing begins with 1 line; a story begins with 1 word; a dream begins with 1 idea, and they all die with 1 doubt. Believe in yourself.
Giuseppe Bianco
#44. [Ed Murrow] admitted he was having trouble coming to grips with the idea of peace: "Trying to realize what has happened, one's mind takes refuge in the past. The war that was seems more real than the peace that has come.
Lynne Olson
#45. I believe the war on poverty is a more American idea than the war on the war on poverty. I believe that most people feel like that. And I believe that it ain't over till it's over.
Bruce Springsteen
#46. When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end.
Jason Reitman
#47. The idea is not to copy nature, but to give a feeling of nature.
Piet Oudolf
#48. I like this idea of generation after generation helping children on the streets, kids who have run away fleeing violence. I like the whole idea of opening arms for children who have nowhere else to go, sleeping by dumpsters.
Laura Bush
#49. I mean, my idea of exciting is getting an Amazon gift card and buying a whole bunch of books.
J. Daniels
#50. I'm Scottish. My idea of foreplay is roll over, Margaret.
Andrea Speed
#51. Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.
James Nachtwey
#52. To me the external existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work incessantly until my death, nature will give me another form of existence when the present can no longer sustain my spirit.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#53. I might not yet be falling in love, but I might be flirting with the promise of love, the idea of love, the making of a place in my heart for love, though it may have been more a wish than a promise.
Diane Meier
#54. I would like", she resumed, "to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.
Rachel Cusk
#55. If I give you a penny, then you're a penny richer and I'm a penny poorer, but if I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I'll have it too.
Eric Schmidt
#56. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
C.S. Lewis
#57. Creativity is simply the human brain forming new connections between ideas, and we all are engaged in this process every day. The common idea that there are some people who are creative and some who are not is a myth. On some level, we are all artists. We are all creators.
Michael Gungor
#58. Do not tolerate for a minute the idea that you are prohibited from any achievement by the absence of in-born talent or ability. This is a lie of the grandest order, an excuse of the saddest kind.
Maxwell Maltz
#59. The whole transgender movement idea is happening in waves around the world. Some areas of the world are further along politically than others. The economy has a lot to do with that, as does moral or religious climate.
Kate Bornstein
#60. You're going to hurt yourself."
She worked up a few tears, letting them glisten on her long dark lashes. "You're hurting me."
"Not yet," Trace told her, unmoved by the false show of emotion. "But the idea of putting you over my knee gets more tempting by the second.
Lori Foster
#61. My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity ... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.
Zadie Smith
#62. I think the idea of individualism has become more dominating in our society. You can even see it by our political system: how people vote, the job situation, the sociological evolution that's happening, what's happening in the Middle East and so forth.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#63. My accent always works with girls. They like it, I have no idea why.
Niall Horan
#64. What was the value, really, of an alibi between lovers, friends, or family members? Idea for greeting card: 'Will You Be My Alibi?
Jincy Willett
#65. To be original is not creating your own idea; it's the essence of the idea in the reader's mind.
Kaela Marooney
#66. It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
Maya Lin
#68. The Family in particular, but also other really **** conservatives come to call what is "Biblical Capitalism." The idea that capitalism is ordained in the Bible and that inasmuch as we interfere with the market, we're interfering with God's literal and visible hand.
Jeff Sharlet
#69. The romantic vision she'd held of her marriage where the two of them came first and children, no matter whose they were, came after that relationship had disappeared, and she had no idea where to find it.
Sarah Jo Smith
#70. An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.
Jonathan Kozol
#71. I have no idea how things work in the life beyond what we know with our senses.
Mimi Kennedy
#72. My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.
Gillian Flynn
#73. The whole idea of the suburbs was to create these family-friendly places where people could flock and have more control over their existences, and keep things very controlled and placid and keep outside forces at bay.
Josh Hamilton
#74. People without clear vision are easily distracted, have a tendency to drift from one idea to another and often make foolish decisions that rob them of their dreams.
Andy Stanley
#75. I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don't seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.
Gayle Forman
#76. The idea of losing someone that you love could throw you into a situation where you could not see your future and you really would be living in the past.
Tom Ford
#77. And I learned that it's a bad idea to curse if you're in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.
Tobias Wolff
#78. The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.
Swami Vivekananda
#79. I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.
Anne Waldman
#80. I felt an odd sense of protectiveness. It flaked off my skin, revealing a red-hot anger at the idea that someone would hurt him.
Lauren Nicolle Taylor
#81. I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometime. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.
Haruki Murakami
#83. I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.
Elena Ferrante
#84. Black men struggle with masculinity so much. The idea that we must always be strong really presses us all down - it keeps us from growing.
Donald Glover
#85. I'm trying to stay open to the idea that the Internet is not the evil foe of publishing but the handmaiden that will turn out to be a blessing for poets and writers.
Joan Larkin
#86. No, no." Amaranthe lifted a hand. "You needn't let me know you think my idea has promise. It's been nearly three months since the last time I almost got myself killed, so I'm brimming with self-confidence. I don't need bolstering.
Lindsay Buroker
#87. It's a deliberate choice. I am a fervent supporter of the idea that you don't have to have wall-to-wall music in good films.
Gustavo Santaolalla
#88. This whole idea of visibility by the public creates a pretty powerful lever. In the new transparency era, you are able to make change you would otherwise have difficulty making. It's no longer possible for somebody just to bury the problem. It's the reason why things like WikiLeaks are important.
Tim O'Reilly
#89. I think that for me, growing up, my dad was in the Navy; we went all over the world. I love things the weirder the better. The idea I could eat things like snails or frogs legs or things like that was mind-blowingly cool.
Graham Elliot
#90. Then I came up with this crazy idea just to walk out on the stage with no band at all and just start singing whatever came to mind. I actually fought the idea for a while because it seemed almost too radical, but it became obvious what I was supposed to be doing.
Bobby McFerrin
#91. Sometimes I have the idea right away, like, "Oh, this is what this song's about. This is how I'm feeling."
Avey Tare
#92. I fell in love with many women at school who had no idea I existed. I'm a bit of a romantic.
Eric Bana
#93. The paintings have a lot to do with the idea of seeing and doing, and the relationship between your hand and your eye, and the object.
Malcolm Morley
#94. Our need is so desperate an idea, a thing, a law can't help us. It took one thing, the gift of gifts, God in the flesh, to rescue us.
Paul David Tripp
#95. I don't suppose you do know precisely what you are after. I don't think in the creative process anyone quite knows. They have a vague idea - a beckoning, an inkling of some truth - it is only in the process that it comes to any clarity.
Lawren Harris
#96. I like the idea of being involved in pictures that can entertain the entire family and can stimulate youngsters into looking at picture books. There's nothing wrong with that.
Nicolas Cage
#97. That's the thing about music: It's forever. Hopefully, you captured a moment musically that has a timeless quality people will find relevant to their lives at any point. That's the whole idea about what I love about art and music.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#98. The federal government ... announced a plan to spend, like, a trillion of taxpayer dollars to buy out bad mortgages and debt. Wall Street was surprisingly enthusiastic about the plan to save their (butts) with other peoples' money. It was either that, or Sarah Palin's idea to sell it all on eBay.
Bill Maher
#99. The real trouble with film school is that the people teaching are so far out of the industry that they don't give the students an idea of what's happening.
Brian De Palma
#100. When I made 'Hard Boiled,' I had no idea that it would be released to an international audience. I just wanted to make a film to team up my two favorite actors, Tony Leung and Chow Yun-Fat.
John Woo
