I don’t care that they stole my idea… I care that they don’t have any of their own.
Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
It’s not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them – the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.[Не ум главное, а то, что направляет его, – натура, сердце, благородные свойства, развитие.]
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences in common.[Worte sind Tonzeichen für Begriffe; Begriffe aber sind mehr oder weniger bestimmte Bildzeichen für oft wiederkehrende und zusammen kommende Empfindungen, für Empfindungs-Gruppen. Es genügt noch nicht, um sich einander zu verstehen, dass man die selben Worte gebraucht: man muss die selben Worte auch für die selbe Gattung innerer Erlebnisse gebrauchen, man muss zuletzt seine Erfahrung mit einander gemein haben.]
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
