“Ideas stand in the corner and laugh while we fight over them.”
“Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them. [Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (The Creativity Post, December 6, 2011)]”
“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.”
“New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”
“The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader s head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer s work and skill and the reader s imagination. Parents, of a sort.”
“Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.”
“Do not get obsolete like an old technology, keep innovating yourself.”
“The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he ll fight and die for it. [As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]”
“James s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation. (Little Review, 1918)”
“Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic”
“Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree - those who think ideas are like food they can taste and spit out if they don t like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won t leave. Until you do something about it.”
“If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.”
“The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.”
“The true measure of wealth is not possessions but what riches you leave behind for the world.”