Ideas Were Quotes

#1. How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?

Fyodor Dostoevsky

#2. I had no idea the amount of people who even knew who I was. Suddenly, they were coming up and saying, "You're my favorite artist." Very surreal. After years of trying to get work, and then coming here and being able to meet some of the fans of Array.

Eric Wight

#3. He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Milan Kundera

#4. Until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in all their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness. Men fight about their philosophies and religions, there is no certainty in them; but their contempt for women is flawless and unanimous.

Dorothy Richardson

#5. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

Kurt Vonnegut

#6. In the end, the thing that really stays with you is not that you were clever enough to connect a sketch to another sketch, but what really sticks with you is when you just have an incredible moment happen, or execute a really funny idea.

Bob Odenkirk

#7. Moshe Dayan would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more had to be rejected; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.

Ariel Sharon

#8. My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.

Julian Barbour

#9. I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he'd take it away.

Hugh Laurie

#10. Of distinction by birth or badge, [Americans] had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets. They had heard only that there were such, and knew that they must be wrong.

Thomas Jefferson

#11. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.

Paul Graham

#12. I travel to work on my motorcycle, so it's jeans, boots and a brown Aero leather jacket that weighs as much as I do. If it were black, it would seem like I've got a Brando idea going on, which I don't.

Hugh Laurie

#13. I can recollect nothing more to say at present; perhaps breakfast may assist my ideas. I was deceived
my breakfast supplied only two ideas
that the rolls were good and the butter bad.

Jane Austen

#14. My own ideas on the mechanism of catalytic phenomena were very different from those at one time commonly held, ideas which I no doubt owed to the influence of the illustrious teacher who had guided my first steps in chemistry nearly twenty years before - I refer, of course, to Berthelot.

Paul Sabatier

#15. 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

#16. The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

Carl Sagan

#17. I think ... that philosophy has the duty of pointing out the falsity of outworn religious ideas, however estimable they may be as a form of art. We cannot act as if all religion were poetry while the greater part of it still functions in its ancient guise of illicit science and backward morals ...

Corliss Lamont

#18. I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?

Kazimir Malevich

#19. We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.

Jeffrey Sachs

#20. If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.

Sylvia Plath

#21. These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

Alain De Botton

#22. Those of us who stayed were younger, more tractable. Less sure of ourselves socially and intellectually, we gave ourselves to the sport with little idea of what we could give or receive.

Stefan Kieszling

#23. Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.

Tony Visconti

#24. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'.

Robyn Schneider

#25. There are some men's souls that are so thin, so almost destitute of what is the true idea of soul, that were not the guardian angels so keen-sighted, they would altogether overlook them.

Henry Ward Beecher

#26. History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Naguib Mahfouz

#27. At the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.

Orhan Pamuk

#28. The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.

Nina Jacobson

#29. Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations.

Honore De Balzac

#30. But there's a restraining order in place.' She speaks slowly, choosing her words carefully. 'I'm not supposed to be this close to you.' You were never supposed to be this close to me,' I say, and I have no idea why.

Barry Lyga

#31. This wasn't about knowledge but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#32. Since many things we see were once an idea, let us create good ideas today because they will be the realities of tomorrow! When you create an idea, do not forget that you shape the future! Idea is your God side! With ideas, you can change the universe, but only with very great ideas!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#33. He was strict and hard and had perfectly clear and definite ideas about duty, where the others were concerned. For oneself one can always find circumstances that alter cases

Hjalmar Soderberg

#34. The wealthiest place on the planet is the graveyard, because in the graveyard we will find inventions that we were never ever exposed to, ideas, dreams that never became a reality, hopes and aspirations that were never acted upon.

Les Brown

#35. To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.

Anna Brownell Jameson

#36. All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.

Barack Obama

#37. Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

Luc Ferrari

#38. Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.

Hugh Howey

#39. We must treat ideas somewhat as though they were baby fish. Throw thousands out into the waters. Only a handful will survive but that is plenty.

Anne Heywood

#40. Ideas were found by the freethinker,
expressed by poet with the new words,
formulated by scholar into knowledge.

Toba Beta

#41. Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

Richard Rodriguez

#42. that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed.

Terry Brooks

#43. In Korea, the director is on top, and the power flows down vertically. On the set, I love to come up with ideas on the spot. But in Hollywood, if I were to come up with a certain idea on set, the idea had to be taken to all these different people who had to agree.

Kim Jee-woon

#44. 'Allen Gregory' came about because we wanted an animated show and we were just tossing around some ideas about me playing a 7-year-old. We thought that would be cool, because we couldn't do that in real life.

Jonah Hill

#45. For instance, some early ideas for Florida were done only recently. The idea of a little village was there from the beginning and now we have this 'Celebration' village. Same thing for the Disney Institute. Walt talked about this idea in the very first.

John Hench

#46. Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move.

Emma Goldman

#47. They enjoy giving form to ideas. If designers were made of ideas, they'd be their own clients.

Rudy VanderLans

#48. There were no hundreds and hundreds of cases of domestic violence. I would have no knowledge of that or have any idea how I would authenticate that. That was never the intent of the writer's conversation with me.

Jerry Angelo

#49. I have a camp so I brought my writers, LaShawn Daniels and at the time, Anesha and Antea [Birchett], they were sisters, and this girl Delisha [Thomas] and Makeba [Riddick]. I brought basically five writers to work on different ideas. You either make the cut or you don't.

Rodney Jerkins

#50. It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.

Helmut Newton

#51. We have no idea how many women were raped in wars - because no one ever asked. So sometimes when people say statistics have escalated, I wonder if, that is true or are we just hearing about things now that we didn't hear about before.

Eve Ensler

#52. You expected too much of me' I told him, and he bowed his head. 'I don't know where you brought your grand ideas of men and women from. I don't want to know' I added hastily. But I must have been a prettier word that this' I said: 'are you quite sure that you were wise in leaving it?

J.M. Barrie

#53. For a very long time science and philosophy were considered part of the same continuum and it was only within the last few hundred years they've been considered different areas of inquiry, and now we're starting to go back to the idea that maybe they aren't two separate realms of inquiry.

Brad Warner

#54. If we were to tell you to deliberately spend ten minutes every day envisaging yourself being very ill, you'd quite rightly refuse to do it. Most people know that's a bad idea - yet those same people may spend time every day worrying about their health.

Peter A. Cohen

#55. I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.

V.S. Pritchett

#56. It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Christopher Fowler

#57. There were no ideas in music, only touch and instinct and sometimes grace - the mechanical tools - and that among those who were given the tools, only a few, a scant few, would be able to tell you something true.

Will Boast

#58. The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald's the biggest and the best. They were content with what they had; they didn't want to be bothered with more risks and more demands.

Ray Kroc

#59. I think we're really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families. So, we were interested in the idea of what the extreme version of that would be.

Zal Batmanglij

#60. The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

Zack Snyder

#61. I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.

Biz Stone

#62. I had a history for starting something and maybe getting halfway done. Then I'd see the same thing I was doing on the bestseller list! My ideas were right, but I hadn't done them fast enough.

Lori Greiner

#63. Piggy was a bore; his fat, his ass-mar and his matter-of-fact ideas were dull,

William Golding

#64. Marriages had different meanings back then than they do now, they were used to cement agreements between families, business deals and things like that. The idea of marriages being arranged for love is some sort of modern idea, really.

Jared Harris

#65. Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.

Shawn Fanning

#66. I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Lord Byron

#67. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I

Karen Armstrong

#68. Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

Brian Greene

#69. All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

Paolo Giordano

#70. When we were talking about this, an idea for this master vigilante, it was an urban guerilla. One of my ideas was that he would be a member of the police force who turned on the government.

David Lloyd

#71. The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

Theodor Adorno

#72. ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author's ideas that they were concatenated without abruption.

Ambrose Bierce

#73. I scanned the criticisms of recent books to see if there were any that resembled mine. I resented them all; it seemed to me too many people wrote in England, too many people had ideas.

Daphne Du Maurier

#74. The need for justice grows out of the conflict of human interests. That is to say, if there were no conflict of interests among mankind we should never have invented the word justice, nor conceived the idea for which it stands.

Thomas Nixon Carver

#75. Like thoughts whose very sweetness yielded proof that they were born for immortality.

William Wordsworth

#76. Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.

Neil Gaiman

#77. I thought not being part of the [Britain] union was a bad idea. We are better together.
It was dangerous for business as there were no [concrete] plans around the currency or the economy.

Michelle Mone

#78. I've never had a five-year plan or a three-year plan, or whatever, ... We had an idea philosophically of what we were going to do and how we were going to do it.

Kirk Ferentz

#79. Today you are more inclined to put your ideas and visions into action than usual were you have the ability to express yourself and solve problems alone.

Auliq Ice

#80. I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.

Deb Caletti

#81. If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas.

Richard Feynman

#82. For years my only purpose was to do documentary photos for magazines, without any idea that they were part of a larger project. It was as if I were carried along by a stream - even though I believed that the current was taking me in the right direction.

Hiroshi Hamaya

#83. Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.

Hugh Mackay

#84. The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#85. Abhor all idea of being saved by good works, but O, be as full of good works as if you were to be saved by them!

Charles Spurgeon

#86. Couture has copied my things for years, in addition to countless other costume designers, claiming theirs were the original ideas. It's all part of the business, unfortunately.

Edith Head

#87. How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Tim Harford

#88. I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.

Janet Evanovich

#89. Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#90. I just kept moodling. I came up with hundreds of ideas. Most of them were too small, but I kept at it and after a while I moodled up a few big ones. With some tinkering, I turned those big ideas into real possibilities and from there I created my masterpiece..." -Dill

Paige Britt

#91. I was on Instagram or something and I checked my tagged photos, and I realized that suddenly they were all LGBT artwork. I was like, "Oh, my god!" I had no idea. It was the first time I realized I was a figure for that community.

Alycia Debnam Carey

#92. I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession.

Samuel Johnson

#93. Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought PLUS feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.

Maxwell Maltz

#94. And then I understood that she had no idea what she'd done to my family. She thought love and hatred were equal.

Alice Hoffman

#95. In the past, most wars were motivated by the idea of nationhood. Today, however, wars are incited above all using religion as an excuse.

Shimon Peres

#96. Then an argument would ensue because they were men with different ideas.

S.A. Tawks

#97. Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

Terry Pratchett

#98. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Oliver Stone

#99. If I were asked to give the best idea of which I am capable, it would be that we should get out of the junk business and then start laying up treasures in heaven.

Sterling W. Sill

#100. As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Martin Amis