Generate Ideas Quotes & Sayings

There are ... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind. — E.T.A. Hoffmann

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas ... when you actually do something physical. — Twyla Tharp

Our Government is committed to supporting Canadian businesses as they grow, innovate and generate high-value jobs - in the West and across the country. The WINN Initiative assists western Canadian businesses in bringing innovative ideas from the test bench to the marketplace. — Michelle Rempel

The research side of academic life is often viewed from the outside as a solo and, at times, lonely activity. In fact, it is quite the opposite: a communal activity in significant part where interaction and interchange generate ideas and critiques of them. — Michael Spence

If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer. — Adam Davidson

Divergent thinking is that one starts thinking from one point and expands from there to generate more ideas. — Pearl Zhu

If we respect students abilities to define their own experiences, to generate their own hypotheses, and to discover new ways of categorizing the world, we might not be so quick to evaluate the adequacy of their answers. We might, instead, begin listening to their questions. Out of the questions of students come some of the most creative ideas and discoveries. — Ellen Langer

We are beginning to learn that intangibles have more specific gravity than we suspected, that ideas can generate as much forward thrust as Atlas missiles. We may win a victory in exploring the infinities of outer space, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory unless we can also explore the infinities of our inner spirit. We have supersensitive thermographs to show us the slightest variations in skin temperature. No devices can teach us the irrelevance of skin color. WE can transplant a heart from one person to another in a brilliant feat of surgical virtuosity. Now we are ready to try it the hard way: transplanting understanding, compassion, and love from one person to another. — Lloyd Alexander

It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them. — Robert Nozick

was Goldman's ideas that were dangerous: her ideal of a just and beautiful society inspired struggles for social change, and her uncompromising presence in public life exposed the hypocrisies of allegedly democratic governance. She had a unique ability to generate coalitions among liberal and radical groups, and among immigrants and native-born citizens, by articulating their common struggles for freedom of speech (including freedom to organize the workplace), right to a fair trial, availability of birth control, right to travel, and an overall spirit of individual freedom. Looking back at Goldman's time from within this gaze, the authorities look extreme, if not paranoid and even ridiculous, for their fervent efforts to silence her rather than simply accept her words as a protected form of speech in American society. — Kathy E. Ferguson

Traveling and other cultures provide me with great inspiration, especially unusual people and cultures totally unlike my own. They generate many new ideas for me. — Kansai Yamamoto

Safety is a basic human need. People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals will generate great ideas. — John Sweeney

The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each. — Roger Martin

Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences — Albert Bandura

College graduates work in every sector of the American economy, and the research engines incubated within our universities generate a wealth of ideas and innovations that have an enormous impact on our lives. — Gordon Gee

Don't cheat people of their growth. Empower them to solve problems and generate ideas. Watch them grow! — Stephen Covey

Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The "evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups," writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. "If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority." The one exception to this is online brainstorming. — Susan Cain

When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music. — Irvine Welsh

Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods. — Ron Chernow

We need a lot of thinking and ideas. We need all the innovators, particularly with the new sustainable technologies - how do we get them to affordability so that people can generate clean energy? — Helen Clark

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

You have two options. work on someone else's ideas and make some money or generate ideas make them work and become a millionaire. — Roberto Llamas

'Juno' really changed things for me and I get a lot of screenplays come in now, but I like to self-generate and I like to kind of pursue my own ideas. And I think the more personal the better. — Jason Reitman

When thinking through who to bring together to generate new ideas, it is more effective to combine specialists from very different and unrelated disciplines rather than a variety of people with different skills sets in the same field. — Simon Mainwaring

While the tendency to generate ideas is rather natural, the path to making them happen is tumultuous. — Scott Belsky

I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself. — Jeff Tweedy

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you'll discover that some good ones slip through. — Seth Godin

Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that's in short supply can't be carved up and shared without destroying it. — John Brunner

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society - in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. — Thomas Friedman

The best idea creators know: To generate a successful idea, you need to give the subconscious full freedom and generate many ideas, no matter how crazy, controversial or unrealistic. However, to be able to generate them you need to give your brain a direction: define an idea quota, deadline, resources and most importantly describe a task as specifically as possible. — Andrii Sedniev

My view is that an investor is better off knowing a lot about a few investments than knowing a little about each of a great many holdings. One's very best idea's are likely to generate higher returns for a given level of risk than one's hundredth or thousandth best idea. — Seth Klarman

I tend to work on a song, generate ideas, and re-arrange it like five times, and I'm glad I take the time to do that, because I think my original songs come out better. — Britta Phillips

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition. — Doug Aitken

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting. — William Scott

There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There's no single answer - not even a single starting point. Even the 'teachers' ... don't offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas. — Frances Moore Lappe

Sales teams use social media to generate leads and track clients as they move through the sales funnel. Operations and distribution teams forecast supply chains, while research and development squads brainstorm product ideas. — Ryan Holmes

All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn't all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it's reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation. — Scott Belsky

The problem, this book will argue, is not just that law schools generate so many bad ideas - mistaken and benighted ideas, impractical and socially destructive ideas - but that those ideas follow a predictable pattern. They confer power on legal intellectuals and their allies - at least the power to prescribe, often the power to litigate. The movement that results - whether couched as public interest law, as minority empowerment law, or as international human rights law - is in fact a bid for power, whether naked or cleverly disguised. — Walter Olson

We can be creative and generate new breakthroughs, if we're willing to work with ideas from the pool of history - both distant and more recent - despite the potential for our experiments to fail. — Doug Dawson

Part of what academics do is generate ideas and teach. The other, perhaps more important part, is to play the role of "the Bu*l*hit Police." Our job is to look at the ideas and plans interested parties put forward to solve our collective problems and see whether or not they pass the sniff test. Austerity as a route to growth and as the correct response to the aftermath of a financial crisis does not pass the sniff test. — Mark Blyth

You can't have good ideas unless you're willing to generate a lot of bad ones. — Seth Godin

After the launch phase, your product is old news. Take advantage of the opportunity to generate interest when your product is new. — Brian Lawley

In our quest to tweet, like, and trend, we have forgotten that brands can be built through advertising. Ads can generate big ideas that can never be trumped by tactics. That is the magic of an ad, and that is what is missing from many ads today. — Jerry Della Femina

Obsessing about one medium versus another is a waste of energy - it is the cultivation and management of ideas, and the people who generate them, that is the crucial factor. — John Hegarty

You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. — William James

Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don't support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck. — James Altucher

I think positive stress is actually a good thing. It's sort of the stretch goal "Wow, let me see how much faster I can run" or "Let me see how many more ideas I can generate in five minutes." — David Allen

If Hollywood is going to keep going, the writers need to be creatively fulfilled by creating their own things. We need to generate new ideas, so we're not always cannibalizing old ones. — Marc Guggenheim

You no longer have to wait for the gods of corporate America, or universities, or media, or investors, to come down from the clouds and choose you for success. In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth. You can develop those ideas, execute on them, and choose yourself for success. — James Altucher

To maintain peace in the world, first maintain peace inside of you. A restless mind can never generate beneficial ideas. — Mehek Bassi

I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another. — Gerald Stanley Lee

Groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas. — Frans Johansson

I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they'd go. — Tim Pratt

The worst period I ever went through at work," a friend confides, "was when the company was restructuring and people were being 'disappeared' daily, followed by lying memos that they were leaving 'for personal reasons.' No one could focus while that fear was in the air. No real work got done." Small wonder. The greater the anxiety we feel, the more impaired is the brain's cognitive efficiency. In this zone of mental misery, distracting thoughts hijack our attention and squeeze our cognitive resources. Because high anxiety shrinks the space available to our attention, it undermines our very capacity to take in new information, let alone generate fresh ideas. Near-panic is the enemy of learning and creativity. — Daniel Goleman

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: living & dying, we feed the fire. — Clive Barker

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words. — Richard Mitchell

ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion — Patricia Crone

It's widely assumed that there's a tradeoff between quantity and quality - if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it - but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. "Original thinkers," Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, "will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas - especially novel ideas. — Adam M. Grant

I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant. — Kevin Smith

If we want a better original idea, we must generate our own before we screen others' suggestions. — Adam Grant

We face the most compelling era of mankind: exponential growth of new technologies, cheaper electronic devices and the globalization of knowledge, commerce, and ideas along with the rapid growth of emerging markets of colossal sizes will generate the best opportunities, connections, higher risks and challenges for everyone. — Franz Christian Israel Digital Entrepreneurs.

There are many ways to generate numerical falsehoods from data, many ways to create proofiness from even valid meaurements. Causuistry distorts the relationships between two sets of numbers. Randumbness creates patterns where none are to be found. Regression to the moon disguises nonsense in mathematical-looking lines or equations or formulae, making even the silliest ideas seem respectable. Such as the one described by this formula:
Callipygianness=(S+C)x(B+F)/T-V)
Where S is shape, C is circularity, B is bounciness, F ir firmness, T is texture, and V is waist-to-hip ratio. This formula was devised by a team of academic psychologists after many hours of serious research into the female derriere. Yes, indeed. This is supposed to be the formula for the perfect butt.

It fact, it's merely a formula for a perfect ass — Charles Seife

While leaders spend considerable time and effort trying to envision markets and pushing out innovation, empathy can often generate simple, yet breakthrough ideas. — John Gerzema