Famous Quotes & Sayings

Emile M. Cioran

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

Emile M. Cioran

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Ellen Goodman

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

Ellen Glasgow

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

Eric S. Raymond

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Eric Ries

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.

Epictetus

When the idea of any pleasure strikes your imagination, make a just computation between the duration of the pleasure and that of the repentance that is likely to follow it.

Emily Carr

How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole.

Emile Durkheim

If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

Elmer Bernstein

Jerry Goldsmith is the #1 composer working now. He's open to new ideas and always inventing.

Henri Poincare

For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

Henri Poincare

I then began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connexion with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.

Henri Poincare

I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.

Henri Poincare

Often when works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, long or short, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.

Henri Matisse

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Heinrich Rohrer

To my knowledge significant progress has never been born of competition. ... In science, being 'better' than others is of little practical value. Examples of how absurd the idea of scientific competition is are abundant.

Heinrich Mann

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

Heidi Julavits

I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive!

Hippolyte Taine

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

Hjalmar Schacht

The aim and the idea of the Four Year Plan were and remain entirely correct and necessary!

Hjalmar Branting

At Geneva, the neutral states were often in agreement concerning the preliminaries for Genoa, and Genoa itself was marked by a quite natural mutual exchange of ideas.

Henry Ford

The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time.

Heinrich Heine

Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea.

Heather O'Neill

All writers have the idea that they are famous.

Hilary Mantel

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

Hilary Mantel

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

Henry Ward Beecher

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Henry Ward Beecher

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

Henry James

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

Helene Cixous

... explore the idea of what the language that women speak would really be like if no one were there to correct them...

Helen Fielding

Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes. But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered.

Johann Most

As set forth by theologians, the idea of 'God' is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.

Johannes Brahms

Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God.