Quotes on Ideas

My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Pabst, had done her master's thesis on Tolkien. She showed me how the trilogy was patterned after Norse mythology. She was also the first person to encourage me to submit stories for publication. The idea of writing a fantasy based on myths never left me, and many years later, this would lead me to write Percy Jackson.

Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.

You've got to be able to hold a lot of contradictory ideas in your mind without going nuts. I feel like to do my job right, when I walk out on stage I've got to feel like it's the most important thing in the world. Also I've got to feel like, well, it's only rock and roll. Somehow you've got to believe both of those things.

There will never be a perfectly good or bad world, because the very idea is a contradiction in terms.

The very idea of an infinite in place would be a contradiction in terms, as a place must begin and continue in time.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

This is the work of Nâma-Rupa - name and form. Everything that has form, everything that calls up an idea in your mind, is within Maya; for everything that is bound by the laws of time, space, and causation is within Maya.

Freedom can never be true of name and form; it is the clay out of which we (the pots) are made; then it is limited and not free, so that freedom can never be true of the related. One pot can never say "I am free" as a pot; only as it loses all ideas of form does it become free.

Do the impossible, because almost everyone has told me my ideas are merely fantasies.

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.

A good idea is never lost. Even though its originator or possessor may die, it will someday be reborn in the mind of another.

I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.

Let's think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it's okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea... well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you're not gonna get people coming up with ideas.

Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production - which subjects animals to a life of torture - has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.