Where Ideas Come From Quotes & Sayings

Everything does come from nature. That's where you get new ideas. Just draw the landscape. I felt doing it with a bit of burnt wood was also good because I was drawing burnt wood with a piece of wood. I wanted to do black and white. After using color, I thought black and white would be good. You can have color in black and white. There is color in them, actually. — David Hockney

Books are where the ideas come from, though the ideas need to be simplified, reduced, submitted to ideological purification." ("Notes on the Mono-Culture"). — Mark Edmundson

I think we are all interested in end-times ideas and also in the current climate that we are all living in, where money is a little harder to come by, things continue to get expensive; gas prices are not too far from people's heads. There are more and more people. Human society's going to have real problems. — Dominic Monaghan

I come from a land where the idea of the whole world being one family is rooted in our ethos 'vasudhaiva kutumbakam'. — Narendra Modi

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one. — Seth Godin

The frightening and most difficult thing about being what somebody calls a creative person is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, really. And especially, you don't have any idea about where they're going to come from tomorrow. — Hal Riney

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them ... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they want to connect, fuse, recombine ... They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.
The single maxim that runs through the book: Where Good Ideas Come From . — Steven Johnson

The Law of Attraction says that you are a "living magnet" and that you invariably attract into your life the people, ideas, opportunities, and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts. When you think positive, optimistic, loving, and successful thoughts, you create a force field of magnetism that attracts, like iron filings to a magnet, the very things you are thinking about. This law explains why it is that you don't have to be concerned where your good is going to come from. If you can keep your mind clearly focused on what you want, and refrain from thinking about what you don't want, you will attract everything you need to achieve your goals, exactly when you are ready. Change your thinking and you change your life. — Brian Tracy

People often ask authors where their ideas come from, and often authors say they don't know. But I do know about this one. Once upon a time, my wife and I had three small children
two boys and a girl, just like in the story. And when they were young, we used to tell them a story very like YOU'RE ALL MY FAVORITES. — Sam McBratney

For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong. — Scott Berkun

One thing," I said, when we had broken apart and the swirling feeling in my head subsided. "Maybe ... don't tell your mom too much about this. I think she has ideas." "What?" he asked, all innocence, as he put an arm around my shoulders and led me back toward his house. "Don't your parents cheer and stare when you make out with someone? Is that weird where you come from? I guess they don't get to see it much, though. From jail, I mean." "Shut it, Weintraub. If I knock you down in the snow, these kids will swarm and eat you. — Maureen Johnson

Artists are interested in pictures as sources of ideas for their work. Where the pictures come from and how they are made is of little concern to them. — Van Deren Coke

Knowing where you have come from is important in forming an idea of where you want to go. — Alexander Stille

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? — Sam Harris

I don't often know where my ideas come from. Maybe it's the fact that I'm obsessively regimented in my analysis, borderline autistic. But whether it's bond selection or asset allocation, we can do it better than just about anybody around. — Jeffrey Gundlach

I thought the whole idea of being a conservative was to keep the government from messing around in people's lives. And yet they say the government should be getting into people's families. That's messing pretty heavily where I come from. — Edward Zigler

One of the most common questions writers are asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages. — Scott Westerfeld

I checked the icebox. The faeries usually brought some sort of food to stock the icebox and the pantry when they cleaned, but they could have mighty odd ideas about what constituted a healthy diet. One time I'd opened the pantry and found nothing but boxes and boxes and boxes of Fruit Loops. I had a near-miss with diabetes, and Thomas, who was never quite sure where the food had come from, declared that I had clearly been driven Fruit Loopy. — Jim Butcher

I don't know where the ideas come from. It's just a matter of us figuring out how to receive the ideas waiting to be heard Muppet Exhibit Seattle EMP Jim Henson — Patricia Kay

I've no idea where ideas come from and I hope I never find out; it would spoil the excitement for me if it turned out I just have a funny little wrinkle on the surface of my brain which makes me think about invisible train platforms. — J.K. Rowling

This landscape of clouds and sky. At first glance you might think that the depths are there where it is darkest; but then you realize that the darkness and softness are only the clouds and that the depths of the universe begin only at the fringes and fjords of this mountain range of clouds - solemn and supreme symbols of clarity and orderliness. The depths and the mysteries of the universe lie not where the clouds and blackness are; the depths are to be found in the spaces of clarity and serenity. Please, just before going to sleep look up for a while at these bays and straits again, with all their stars, and don't reject the ideas or dreams that come to you from them. — Hermann Hesse

People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question ... I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet! — C.K. Webb

So where do the ideas-the salable ideas-come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious. — Stephen King

Where was innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile coloni with few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological innovation or prosperity for society. N — Daron Acemoglu

Grade A objectivity won't come from those who are closest to us. It will come from outsiders. That's where we'll find divergent thinking, unexpected questions, novel ideas, differences of opinion, and added expertise. — David Sturt

The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it. — Douglas Adams

In recent years, psychologists have learned more about how creative ideas come from the reveries of solitude. When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive. For some, this goes against cultural expectations. American culture tends to worship sociality. We have wanted to believe that we are our most creative during "brainstorming" and "groupthink" sessions. But this turns out not to be the case. New ideas are more likely to emerge from people thinking on their own. Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations. — Sherry Turkle

Letting go of that will likely spin you inward on a journey examining your old ideas about yourself, where they have come from and where you want to go from here. But that journey - that is one worth having. Because unlike the tales of the joys at the end of the pursuit of perfection, there is peace there. It is within you to find it. — Erin Brown

In the time of Luther, Spinoza, Galileo, or Voltaire people did not complain because they were "offended" or "insulted" by the ideas these men put forward.123 New ideas were suppressed, to be sure, and even more brutally than nowadays, but not because people said they felt "offended." The Inquisition was not "insulted" by the heretics, atheists, and secularists they brought to the stake. Where does this contemporary preoccupation with being "offended" and "insulted" come from? Why do people feel victimized if contradicted? What is the origin of those frequent calls for "respect" and "dialogue," as if there were people who advocated "disrespect" or would favor stopping the dialogue? — Paul Cliteur

Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas. — Ira Glass

The wild, the absurd, the seemingly crazy: this kind of thinking is where new ideas come from ... The people capable of such playful thought carry forward their childish qualities and childhood dreams, applying them in areas where most of us get stuck, victims of our adult seriousness. Staying a child isn't easy. — Nicholas Negroponte

The question authors get asked more than any other is "Where do you get your ideas from?" And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again. — Philip Pullman

Songwriters can't explain. You get an idea and you don't know where it's come from. And if you're lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down. — Pete Seeger

Young people don't even consider that it's a good idea to be out on the fringe, which is where good ideas come from. — Louis C.K.

Unlike John Lasseter's bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon's individual employees - even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company's core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, A leader's job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow. — Reid Hoffman

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect. — Steven Johnson

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,
how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it. — George Eliot

I have resigned from the professional undertaking of coin flipping. I am not here to tell you where gold's going to be. I have no idea. That's my existentialism. I am a student of uncertainty, I have no idea where the stock market is going to be. So when I am creating trades in my portfolio for my clients, I am agnostic. I just want to enhance the probability that I make money come what may. — Hugh Hendry

How do popular attitudes get formed? Do the movies just reflect it or inform it? Where does this particular idea come from? I don't know if I can say anything too illuminating. — Thom Andersen

I don't know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple cups of coffee into me and weird things just start to happen. — Gary Larson

It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;
but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn't wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she's a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else - things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things - but she doesn't wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I thought of muses as inventions to protect one's insight, to avoid questions like "Where do your ideas come from?" Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction. — Toni Morrison

How have you arrived at your thinking? Where do your ideas and knowledge come from, and why do you credit some knowledge and discredit others? — Barbara Marciniak

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard. — Jim Henson

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question. — Jennifer Egan

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from. — Anthony Browne

Ending Notions of Happiness

Each of us has a notion of how we can be happy. It would be very helpful if we took the time to reconsider our notions of happiness. We could make a list of what we think we need to be happy : "I can only be happy if ... " [...] Where did these ideas come from? Are they reality? Or are they only your notions? If you are committed to a particular notion of happiness, you do not have much chance to be happy.
Happiness arrives from many directions. If you have a notion that it comes only from one direction, you will miss all of these other opportunities because you want happiness to come only from the direction you want. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly ,as I was able to, travelling around the world. — Matthew Reilly

I don't really ask myself too much where the ideas come from. When things touch you or anger you, you are moved to want to examine them, to reflect on them. But yes, I guess you could say ['Amour'] is a memento mori, though it would never occur to me to use that term, since it might sound a little bit sentimental. — Michael Haneke

Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. — Mao Zedong

Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one's self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realisation may be enormous, as vast as the distance between the stars. — Robert Beer

Where are the young who must dedicate their roseate hours, their illusions and enthusiasm to the good of the country? Where are they who must generously spill their blood to wash away so much shame, so many crimes, so much abomination? Pure and spotless must be the victim for the holocaust to be acceptable. Where are you, you children who must embody the vigor of life that has fled from your veins, the purity of ideas that has become in our minds and the fire of enthusiasm that has gone out in our hearts? We await you, Oh youth! Come, we await you! — Jose Rizal

I am not talking about rebelliousness, but giving people time for constructive internal reflection and even daydreaming. A lot of research is suggesting that the more that you demand people's external attention, the less chance you are allowing them to dip into the default mode where daydreams and reflection happen - and lot of great ideas are not going to come from the brute force of work but from personal life experience. Mind-wandering seems to be essential to the creative process, and I don't think a lot of businesses are aware of that fact. — Scott Barry Kaufman

Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines. — Nicholas Negroponte

Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred. — Darynda Jones

I enjoy being a student and learning. I don't think you should ever stop being a student. That's where the most creative ideas come from. Teaching is a blessing as well because I get to share what I've learned and my passion for creative movement with people. — Derek Hough

I don't want to be one of these people who's like, "Man, I don't know where my ideas come from and I don't know why this works." — David Rees

It doesn't matter if you have the greatest product in the world if no one will buy it. Have an idea of where your customers will come from and how to get to them. Partner with blogs and magazines that target that audience. If you partner with them, hopefully you won't have to spend money on advertising. — Cameron Johnson

When you completely extract yourself from anything familiar, you start reverting back to that state of mind where you're having conversations with yourself, and that's where the weirdest and most honest ideas come from. — Alan Palomo

As a leader, these attributes - confidence, perseverance, work ethic and good sense - are all things I look for in people. I also try to lead by example and create an environment where good questions and good ideas can come from anyone. — Heather Bresch

It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest the laws. But it does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that.So the next thing we have to talk about is where the new ideas come from. Actually, it does not make any difference, as long as they come. — Richard Feynman

Off come her skirts and petticoats, her lace cuffs and collar, her shoes and whalebone stay, until she lies on her side in nothing but a cotton shift and endless strands of pearls. Dust hangs in a crack of light between red velvet drapes, like stars.

Her dreams are glimpses, bewildered--celestial charts, oceanic swells, massive, moving bodies of water, the heavens as heavenly liquid, familiar whirlpools, the universe as a ship lost at sea--but the ship she imagines arrived safely, years ago, loaded with their possessions. — Danielle Dutton

I don't know where ideas come from. They come from outer space or God, if you like, or from my subconscious mind. But I never go ou self-consciously looking for a story. — Richard Adams

I HAVE NO IDEA WHATS COMING NEXT OR WHERE IT WILL COME FROM; I ENJOY THE SURPRISE OF IT ALL. — Mandy Patinkin

For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile. — E.L. Konigsburg

I'm not the new Cameron Diaz. I'm not the new Keira Knightley, either. I don't know where these ideas come from. I'd rather be thought of as the one and only Laura Haddock. I'll happily settle for that. — Laura Haddock

Some people can sit and enjoy the view ... some people like to take photos to feel complete. I need to somehow possess it in some other way. I just have to somehow grasp it and take it home in a more fulsome way. It's where ideas come from. — Graeme Base

I find motion, literally, is where ideas come from. It's almost like a built-in rhythm section. The contents of the songs are about change, and a lot of that stuff happens when you're on tour, and you wake up and you're in a different place and you start thinking about where you're going and where you've been. — Kathleen Edwards

The idea of the nest in the bird's mind, where does it come from? — Joseph Joubert

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness. — Taiye Selasi

Think about how many great works of art or game-changing ideas were ahead of their time - their creator's talent underappreciated until many years later. That's how we need to treat our young people - because who knows where the next great idea will come from? — Ashley Bryan

I'm not particularly interested in working with movie stars. It depends on where you come from, I suppose. Why are you making films? The reason I want make films is because they convey ideas. I think some directors make films because they want to hang out with movie stars and be part of Hollywood. They want to be a star themselves. — Neill Blomkamp

When we put aside partisanship, embrace the best ideas regardless of where they come from and work for principled compromise, we can move America not left or right, but forward. — William J. Clinton

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from, but when I get into a songwriting mode and it's coming along, it's like you're on the front end of a boat and you're going through the water, and the breeze is blowing through your hair and the water's smooth, and you're going out to sea. I love that feeling. — Robert Earl Keen

The longer I have been on the raw food path, the more I tend to come full circle and return to where my original ideas and inspiration of wanting to eat raw food come from - and that's natural hygiene and its principles. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

As long as you believed it was coming, the dream was actually on its way. All things in the universe that were required to see the dream come true were gathering for your benefit. However, and this is where most men fail, the moment you entertain doubt or fear, all of those forces reverse and the things, the ideas, the situations, the people you need immediately draw away from you.
Our negative thoughts actually and literally cause the blessings to be repelled. if you can picture what you want, and believe that it is on its way, but God's law it must come. — Leslie Householder

The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go. — Paul Beatty

Believe me, a highly strung brain such as yours demands occasional relaxation from the strain of domestic surroundings. Forget for a little while that children want music lessons, and boots, and bicycles, with tincture of rhubarb three times a day; forget there are such things in life as cooks, and house decorators, and next-door dogs, and butchers' bills. Go away to some green corner of the earth, where all is new and strange to you, where your over-wrought mind will gather peace and fresh ideas. Go away for a space and give me time to miss you, and to reflect upon your goodness and virtue, which, continually present with me, I may, human-like, be apt to forget, as one, through use, grows indifferent to the blessing of the sun and the beauty of the moon. Go away, and come back refreshed in mind and body, a brighter, better man - if that be possible - than when you went away. — Jerome K. Jerome

Performance art is really about the sociology of the artist, where ideas come from, and the confluence of those ideas. — Roselee Goldberg

Books are made out of books." - Cormac McCarthy Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From David Byrne, How Music Works Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job Kio Stark, Don't Go Back to School Ian Svenonius, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group Sidney Lumet, Making Movies P.T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting — Austin Kleon

Nothing comes naturally to me ... I have to work and rework and that's where
the ideas come from - from years of working on it and thinking about it. — Markus Zusak

Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities. — Nicholas Negroponte

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that ... we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies. — Alice Weaver Flaherty