Ideas Were Quotes & Sayings

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas. — Alan Moore

There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas. — Daniel Boulud

Indian sages avoided the written word as they realized ideas were never definitive; they were transformed depending on the intellectual and emotional abilities of the giver as well as the receiver. — Devdutt Pattanaik

In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters. — Katherine Losse

The purpose of this overview is not to reject previous ideas and images about Mary, many of which were and still are inspiring and comforting to people. Rather, the hope is that as we have rediscovered scripture since Vatican II, we can view Mary as a strong Jewish woman, a model who can inspire women in the twenty-first century. — Mary Christine Athans

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator. — Novalis

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. — Sinclair Lewis

Once you take the time to consider the other person's perspective, you will become sympathetic to his feel ins and ideas. You will be able to authentically and honestly say, I don't blame you for feeling as you do. If I were in your position, I would feel just as you do. — Dale Carnegie

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

We shouldn't be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks. — Donald Miller

These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas. — Matt Ridley

In the Art of Dreaming Don Juan tells Carlos, " ... most of our energy goes into upholding our importance ... if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe." — Carlos Castaneda

I can draw with sound. That's the most useful thing I learned in terms of what my craft is ... The arrangements were mine. They were little lines and stuff that I had written myself ... And I was locked into this idea that vocals didn't count, melodies didn't count, songwriting craftsmanship didn't count. The only thing that counted was high arching guitar solos. — Linda Ronstadt

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your
wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father. — Soren Kierkegaard

In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. — Slavoj Zizek

I remember my parents quarrelling. They would talk as if they were against each other's ideas about Trotsky, but it was just a couple arguing. — Maria De Medeiros

I don't know if we'd have been as dominant as we were last season. The new things, the new ideas the manager brought in everyone took them on board so well. He is special. — Frank Lampard

In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. 'You can't do that. There won't be enough parts to go around. There won't be enough for the girls.' This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren't doing _Death of a Salesman._ _We were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts?_ If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough. The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn't have any ideas. — Tina Fey

As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit. — Janna Levin

Well, if I were you, I'd leave him. I'd find someone with a more normal way of looking at things and live happily ever after. There's no way in hell you can be happy with him. The way he lives, it never crosses his mind to try to make himself happy or to make others happy. Staying with him will only wreck your nervous system. To me, it's already a miracle that you've been with him three years. Of course, I'm very fond of him in my own way. He's fun, and he has lots of great qualities.
He has strengths and abilities that I could never hope to match. But in the end, his ideas about things and the way he lives his life are not normal. Sometimes, when I'm talking to him, I feel as if I'm going
around and around in circles. The same process that takes him higher and higher leaves me going around in circles. It makes me feel so empty! Finally, our very systems are totally different. Do you see what I'm saying? — Haruki Murakami

Ideas are like beards. Men don't have them until they grow up. Somebody said that, but I can't remember who."
"Voltaire," the younger man said. He rubbed his chin and smiled, a cheerful,
unaffected smile. "Voltaire might be off the mark, though, when it comes to me. I have hardly any beard at all, but have loved thinking about things since I was a kid."
His face was indeed smooth, with no hint of a beard. His eyebrows were narrow, but thick, his ears nicely formed, like lovely seashells. "I wonder if what Voltaire meant wasn't ideas as much as meditation," Tsukuru said. The man inclined his head a fraction. "Pain is what gives rise to meditation. It has
nothing to do with age, let alone beards. — Haruki Murakami

Insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there. We've all felt that. And all of us, one way or another, are insane. — Paulo Coelho

Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it, and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights.
And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else. — Terry Pratchett

I didn't actually know what the protesters in the West really wanted. It was fantastic here, so much freedom, and that was what they were calling musty, middle-class, and fascistic, a bleak period. Bleak was what the GDR was, and it alone had adopted, almost unchanged, Nazi Germany's methods of intimidation and ideas about propaganda and the use of force. — Gerhard Richter

A really sublime moment is that when the last ray of light breaks in upon the soul, and marshals into a single group all the scattered disconnected truths there. There is such a vast difference between the moment which follows, and the moment which precedes this one, between what we were before, and what we are after, that the word grace has been invented to convey the idea of this magic stroke, of this light from on high. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

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

I was raised to think about philosophy and religious thought and the soul and the spirit of humankind in a different way, also really socially progressive teachings of the Baha'i faith, the equality of men and women, the elimination of racial prejudice, the equality of science and religion, so it was a big cauldron of big ideas in my household. And we were weird and unhappy family, but nonetheless that was a really positive thing that came out of it. — Rainn Wilson

Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy. — Ilana Mercer

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them ... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. — Pearl S. Buck

She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience. — Wade Davis

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home is redefined as a problem. — Ellen Willis

Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here. — Fran Lebowitz

There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent. — David Longstreth

Back in the eighth century bc two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, occupied roughly the territory of modern Israel. The two kingdoms fought each other, but their inhabitants shared a religion and a common ancestry, because all of them belonged to one of twelve tribes descended from the twelve sons of Jacob. The kingdom of Israel was the older of the two and was originally the location of the religion's holy sites. When that kingdom was invaded by the Assyrians in the eighth century bc, though, tens of thousands of its inhabitants were carried off to northern Iraq. The kingdom of Judah was spared; its inhabitants came to be called Judeans, and then Jews. They, too, were taken into exile in Babylon, and came back with new ideas and changed traditions. As for the exiles from Israel, they were never heard of again, and came to be called the Ten Lost Tribes. But not all the ten tribes were truly lost, say the Samaritans. Some were deported by the Assyrians, yes, but others remained. — Gerard Russell

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

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. "Mister Jem," he said, "we're mighty glad to have you all here. Don't pay no 'tention to Lula, she's contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an' haughty ways - we're mighty glad to have you all." With that, Calpurnia led us to the church door where we were greeted by Reverend Sykes, who led us to the front pew. First Purchase was unceiled and unpainted within. Along its walls unlighted kerosense lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit a faded pink silk banner proclaimed God Is Love, the church's only decoration except a roto-gravure print of Hunt's The Light of the World. — Harper Lee

When you travel with your family, you may not get the volume of work done you would if you were alone, but you can still do something while recharging. If nothing else, you can gather your own thoughts, write down ideas, observe people around you, and reflect on experiences. Working doesn't always mean putting words on paper. — Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

In the past few years, genetics have confirmed that the hunter-gatherers were not overwhelmed by the new wave of sedentary farmers, and that the first agricultural revolution spread well in advance of its first users, by contact and trade in ideas. Nice to see science catching up with economics and military history. Any economist could tell you technology spreads beyond its first adopters, even if they stay at home. And any military historian could tell you that, in a contest between people who hunt and kill aurochs and farmers armed with hoes, the smart money is on the hunters. — Markham Shaw Pyle

I knew I wanted to be permanently self-supporting and I vaguely thought I might work somewhere in the realm of ideas. I felt that I had within me an undeveloped fount of ideas. I did not know exactly what my ideas were, but whatever they were I wanted to convert people to them. — Rheta Childe Dorr

This civilization was able to spring into existence because the peoples were dominated by ideas which were the application of the teachings of economics to the problems of economic policy. It will and must perish if the nations continue to pursue the course which they entered upon under the spell of doctrines rejecting economic thinking. — Ludwig Von Mises

Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation. — Anne Waldman

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas. — Carl Bernstein

When the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients. — Rebecca West

India - The land of Vedas, the remarkable works contain not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all were known to the seers who founded the Vedas. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Galen maintained that the human womb had two cavities, in which he was followed by the major Arabic medical writers. The idea that there were seven divisions, three warmer ones on the right engendering males, three colder ones on the left engendering females, and a seventh, in the middle, producing a hermaphrodite,
may have resulted from a systemization in Byzantine medicine of various separate ancient ideas bearing upon multiple births and sex differentiation; — Nancy G. Siraisi

Yeah, well, we were looking for something sort of anonymous. It suggests what it is, but I like that it's modest. I feel like that's an underrated virtue. It's modest and it's kind of anonymous, which I liked, because it reminds me of my own ideas about why music should be played, which is not to be a star. That was never my intention. — Zooey Deschanel

Have you ever had a big idea or dream - something you wanted so bad ... but you were too scared to make it happen, or maybe you didn't really believe it could? Think of how often you've had someone you looked up to or viewed as successful - shoot one of your suggestions full of holes. Ideas and babies have a lot in common - they require a lot of nourishment to survive. A new idea, regardless of its size, may not be able to withstand a beating when you first give it birth. — Bob Proctor

The notions category and functor were not formulated or put in print until the idea of a natural transformation was also at hand. — Saunders Mac Lane

I've been wanting for some time to find a way of stylizing cinema and trying to get closer to the emotional story I was telling and get rid of all the bumph that goes with it and allow the audience a more participatory experience. It was an attempt to do all of those things and to express the idea that all these people were just performing roles in their lives. — Joe Wright

Every valuable creative idea must always be logical in hindsight. If it were not, we would never be able to see its value. — Edward De Bono

Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped. — Jack London

There are more people at Obama's table offering ideas than there were five years ago, but when it came to facing up to the Republicans' threat to force a double-dip recession if they didn't get their millionaires' tax cut, they still amounted to nothing. And therein lies our fundamental problem. — Eric Alterman

The ideas embodied in the New Deal Legislation were a compilation of those which had come to maturity under Herbert Hoover's aegis. We all of us owed much to Hoover — Rexford Tugwell

Serra was a mix of light and darkness; he was a man of great vision and great blindness, of immense zeal and immense stubbornness. In his own mind, his goals justified his treatment of the Indians, whom he loved as the children he did not have and whom he disciplined with the same ardor with which he disciplined himself. His vision, like that of many of his eighteenth century contemporaries, demanded intolerance against those with different ideas about this world and the next. These qualities do not make him an angel or a devil; they simply make him a man of his time and place. His time and place were, like ours, far from perfect."26 — Christian Clifford

I would ask my parents something, but then go to my siblings. We were encouraged to bounce ideas off everyone. — Ahmet Zappa

The probabilitation of possibilities is the mother of many unrealistic ideas,uninformative decisions,inappropriate measures and unfair actions because most of the times we were approximate where we needth to be exact. — Mpho Leteng

Listen to your beliefs, think about how you learned them, and realize that they are not genetic, nor are they the "only way." You are free to acquire new perspectives, to absorb new ideas, and to question everything you were taught to believe. As your mind opens to exploration and change, you'll feel a new lightness and more joy. — Charlotte Sophia Kasl

People have always said that I could have been a highly successful pop artist, if only that were my intention. It never was. My original intention was to be a kind of behind-the-scenes participant in music, to just be a record producer and engineer. And I made a record for myself just so I could have an outlet for my musical ideas. — Todd Rundgren

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. — Hermann Hesse

All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy - making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Oh Cecelia, you would have loved my grandmother, Miz Goodpepper said, dunking a cookie into her wine. She was so alive and full of original ideas, especially for that era. While other women were busy being proper, she was busy cultivating her spirit. — Beth Hoffman

These weren't college kids on acid. They were preachers, and bankers, and farmers, and the salt of American society subscribing to ideas that now seem so wild to us. These people had the most radical visions of what the future could be. And this was happening in an era we don't typically associate with sexual experimentation, or communism, or things like that. — Christine Jennings

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

Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. — Pankaj Mishra

Only yourself can critizice your ideas for you are the only one who knows where are they coming from and how they were born. — Pedro A. Perez Raymond

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Such revolutions in formal learning and felt experience needed new modes to express their understanding, beyond sonorous Ciceronian periods and the rigid structure of heroic couplets. It needed something looser, longer, and above all historical, which could not only link events, data, ideas, and context through time, but in which history could itself serve as an informing principle. The age craved creation stories in which the logic and moral order were manifest in and through the unfolding of the story. — Lydia Pyne

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there? — Roger Ebert

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out. — Stephen King

Zines are not a new idea. They have been around under different names (ChapBooks, Pamphlets, Flyers). People with independent ideas have been getting their word out since there were printing presses. — Mark Todd

Free speech is a great idea, but were in a war. — Lindsey Graham

Often when you get a really good script, and you receive the new pages, you see that the entire thing has been dumbed down. Films in the '30s and '40s, that were huge blockbusters, were very sophisticated in their language, and the ideas they brought. There were no questions about whether the audience would get it or not. — Connie Nielsen

The numerals of Pythagoras," says Porphyry, who lived about 300 A.D, "were hieroglyphic symbols, by means whereof he explained all ideas concerning the nature of things," and the same method of explaining the secrets of nature is once again being insisted upon in the new revelation of the "Secret Doctrine," by H. P. Blavatsky. — W. Wynn Westcott

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

Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud. — Victor Hugo

I wanted to make a film about anorexia. I thought about it for a long time, but then gave up on this idea as I felt that this theme would be so hermetic and closed that it would not reach an audience. However, the plot about the character of Olga and the idea that a body has a lot of different meanings were still present in my mind. — Malgorzata Szumowska

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. — J.G. Ballard

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn't allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren't noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor's steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one's sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. — Wendy Welch

Whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts cannot take a better method than by putting himself into the circumstances and postures of life that the author was in upon every important passage as it flowed from his pen; for this will introduce a parity and strict correspondence of ideas between the reader and the author. Now, to assist the diligent reader in so delicate an affair, as far as brevity will permit, I have recollected that the shrewdest pieces of this treatise were conceived in bed in a garret; at other times (for a reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my invention with hunger; and in general, the whole work was begun, continued, and ended under a long course of physic and great want of money. — Jonathan Swift

It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage
the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72) — Hilary Thayer Hamann

Exactly. You know what it says in the Book of Job." "Remind me." "Well, Satan is there in heaven, with God. God says, where have you been? And Satan says, roaming around the earth! It's a regular conversation. And they begin arguing about Job. Satan believes Job's goodness is founded entirely upon his good fortune. And God agrees to let Satan torment Job. This is the most nearly true picture of the situation which we possess. God doesn't know everything. The Devil is a good friend of his. And the whole thing is an experiment. And this Satan is a far cry from being the Devil as we know him now, worldwide." "You're really speaking of these ideas as if they were real beings ... — Anne Rice

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books. — Cynthia Voigt

What makes horror movies work is the idea that "oh my God, what would I do if I were in that situation? How would I get out of that alive? What would I do if I saw the door to my closet creaking open in the middle of the night and a doll on a tricycle comes riding out?" — James Wan

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world. — Terry Pratchett

The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale. — Helen Hayes

I'm frustrated and sad to think of all the good people who have abandoned Christianity because they felt they had to choose between their faith and their intellectual integrity or between their religion and their compassion. I'm heartbroken to think of all the new ideas they could have contributed had someone not told them that new ideas were unwelcome — Rachel Held Evans

His distaste was palpable. Although he cultivated ideas that embraced the perverse and forbidden, Stephen was squeamish, and his adventures were strictly of the fashionable, literary sort. — Siri Hustvedt

Your enemies hate you more than they hate your ideas. Should you want a project to be undone propose it. Even if it were as useful as a bishop's mire it would be rejected. Once you are defeated let the humblest-looking among you sponsor it and your enemies to humble you will approve it. — Jose Rizal

In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? "It was good for you; how was it for me?") — Steven Pinker

But Hannah's friend didn't understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn't understand Hannah's stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn't understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn't hurt, didn't cry, didn't spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah's best ideas - sometimes her only ideas - were buried beneath the skin. — Jake Vander Ark

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process ... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas. — M.H. Abrams

It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.
Very odd, isn't it. — Josephine Tey

The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together. — Gloria Steinem

America, in the eyes of the world, typifies above all else this quality of initiative. The greatest successes are nearly all the fruit of initiative. Why do we hold in such high esteem the achievements of the Wright brothers? Because they were illustrious examples of initiative and tenacity. And ideas are born of initiative, the children of men and women of initiative. Advancement is applied initiative. Don't imitate. Initiate. — B.C. Forbes

At any rate', said I, 'we can now state the problem accurately. People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don't you think that all you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people? — C.S. Lewis

For a long time I felt that FDR had developed many thoughts and ideas that were his own to benefit this country, the United States. But, he didn't. Most of his thoughts, his political ammunition, as it were, were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the Council on Foreign Relations - One World Money group. Brilliantly, with great gusto, like a fine piece of artillery, he exploded that prepared "ammunition" in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people, and thus paid off and returned his internationalist political support. — Curtis Bean Dall

The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems. — Ray Bradbury

Let's stick to the practical and the concrete: Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world? If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology? If you don't like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous. — Theodore Kaczynski

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban