Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.

Kathy Reichs

Why do all your brilliant ideas involve felonies?

Kurt Fuller

I had no idea that, when you audition for television or movies, you go to a big building - like, an office building - and you walk in the room, and everybody, I assumed, was smarter than me and better than me, and there's actors you recognize. I once fainted at an audition.

Kevin Whately

I'm fascinated by politicians, because I suspect the huge majority of them go into it full of ideas and for the best possible reasons but end up being hijacked.

Kerry Packer

There is a lot more young Indian entrepreneurs can do if they are given the money. They have the idea, and I would just like to help them realise it.

Kevin Ashton

Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined...

Kerry Washington

From what I've been told, the scariest part of being part of a domestic abuse relationship is the idea that you cannot escape and you cannot get help, that feeling of being stuck.

Jonathan Nolan

You know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.

Jonathan Sacks

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.