Bright Ideas Quotes

The first rule of discovery is to have brains and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait till you get a bright idea. ~ George Polya

Knowledge and ideas tend to be a bit like experience - nice, but not necessarily useful. Clear thinking, logical priorities and the ability to reason will beat bright ideas and unassisted experience everytime. ~ Carroll Smith

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness. ~ Julia Cameron

High School. Society's bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life. ~ Chris Colfer

You have to listen to your own voice. Not your heart, not your instincts, not any of that self-permissive psycho-babble stuff. No, none of that. If it was just about instincts and bright ideas it wouldn't need to be a voice. It's about words. You hear them, read them, then you write. But mostly read. Read the bloody poems. ~ Fleur Adcock

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. ~ Eric Bentley

Trying to do good to people without God's help is no easier than making the sun shine at midnight. You discover that you've got to abandon all your own preferences, your own bright ideas, and guide souls along the road our Lord has marked out for them. You mustn't coerce them into some path of your own choosing. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

Soul Gathers Force It is possible, when the future is dim, when our depressed faculties can form no bright ideas of the perfection and happiness of a better world,-it is possible still to cling to the conviction of God's merciful purpose towards His creatures, of His parental goodness even in suffering, still to feel that the path of duty, though trodden with a heavy heart, leads to peace. ~ William Ellery Channing

The lampshade on my head is for my bright ideas. I won't be able to convey them until Monday, when my curtain gets out of the dry cleaners. ~ Bauvard

My concepts are never bright ideas; they're never notions I think will sell or be trendy or attract new fans. I don't think that way. All I can do is sing from my life. ~ Janet Jackson

Momo would have been delighted, except that most of the newcomers had no idea how to play. All they did was sit around looking bored and sullen and watching Momo and her friends. Sometimes they deliberately broke up the other children's games and spoiled everything. Squabbles and scuffles were frequent, though these never lasted long because Momo's presence had its usual effect on the newcomers, too, so they soon started having bright ideas themselves and joining in with a will. The trouble was, new children turned up nearly every day, some of them from distant parts of the city, and one spoilsport was enough to ruin the game for everyone else. But there was another thing that Momo couldn't quite understand - a thing that hadn't happened until very recently. More and more often these days, children turned up with all kind of toys you couldn't really play with: remote-controlled tanks that trundled to and fro but did little else, or space rockets that whizzed around on strings but got nowhere, or model robots that waddled along with eyes flashing and heads swiveling but that was all. They were highly expensive toys such as Momo's friends had never owned, still less than Momo herself. Most noticeable of all, they were so complete, down to the tiniest detail, that they left nothing at all to the imagination. Their owners would spend hours watching them, mesmerized but bored, as they trundled, whizzed, and waddled along. Finally, when that palled, they would go back to the famili ~ Michael Ende, Momo

Hillary Clinton respects good ideas wherever they come from. That's something I haven't seen in a lot of powerful people. ~ Ronan Farrow

Respect your parents. What they tell you is true. Hard work, dedication and faith will get you anything. Imagination will drive itself. You can get anything you want, but you have to have faith behind all your ideas. Stick to your goals and have an undying faith. ~ Russell Simmons

Embrace your weirdness. Some will adore you. Others won't. But who cares? Worry about loving yourself, not loving the idea of other people loving you. ~ Karen Salmansohn

Today I will refuse to jump into the middle of others' affairs, issues, and relationships. I will trust others to work out their own problems, including the ideas and feelings they want to communicate to each other. ~ Melody Beattie

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was so pissed off at what happened, at myself, I didn't think."
He stroked a hand down her hair first, then gave the choppy ends a quick tug. "I'm not angry with you."
"I know. You could be, but you're not. So I have to be even sorrier."
"Your logic is fascinating, and elusive."
"I can't pay you back with sex or salt-crusted sea bass or whatever because you're too busy taking care of me. So now I've got this black mark in my column against the bright shiny star in yours, and - "
He tipped her head up. "Are we keeping score?"
"No. Maybe. Shit."
"How am I doing?"
"Undisputed champ."
"Good. I like to win." He brushed her bangs back to study the injury himself. "You'll do. Let's eat. ~ J.D. Robb

During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row.
They were so big, so bright, so beautiful, so magnificent to Carmen's eyes that she thought she was imagining them. They were like goddesses, like Titans. She was so proud of them! They were benevolent and they were righteous. Now, these were friends. ~ Ann Brashares

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it. ~ Thomas Mann

There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent. ~ Emile Durkheim

bananaland, where the jungle had been leveled and replaced by endless acres of banana trees, each displaying bunches of bananas enclosed in bright blue plastic bags. The bags would be filled with insecticide and chemicals deemed essential to marketing bananas where winter was cold and people liked their fruit in uniform: industrial agriculture gone tropical. Later, after the harvest, many of the bags ended up in the Caribbean, where they would be mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by turtles that would then choke to death. Unlike the complex ecosystems of the rainforest and jungle, mono-crop plantings like bananas couldn't hold the ground; when the hard rains fell - it ~ J.J. Henderson

Emotion. Passion. Ideas. Simplicity. These are the big things that big business needs from its creative agencies. No one else is going to provide these essential elements for business. ~ Kevin Roberts

So you used to know everything?"
She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play."
"To play what?"
"This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars. ~ Neil Gaiman

What's wonderful about Google is that as long as you bring ideas to the table, it doesn't matter what else is going on. ~ Vinton Cerf

I didn't take up shorthand with any idea of becoming a professional at it. It merely appeared to me to be a good thing to know - something that might come in handy. ~ Charles M. Schwab

You have to be willing - you have strong ideas, you have strong views, but you have to be willing also to look at experience. ~ Rudy Giuliani

Not only are we here to protect the public from vicious criminals in the street but also to protect the public from harmful ideas. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

And the son bursting into his father's house, killing him, and at the same time not killing him, this is not even a novel, not a poem, it is a sphinx posing riddles, which it, of course, will not solve itself. If he killed him, he killed him; how can it be that he killed him and yet did not kill him--who can understand that? Then it is announced to us that our tribune is the tribune of truth and sensible ideas, and so from this tribune of 'sensible ideas' an axiom resounds, accompanied by an oath, that to call the murder of a father parricide is simply a prejudice! But if parricide is a prejudice, and if every child ought to ask his father, 'Father, why should I love you?'--what will become of us, what will become of the foundations of society, where will the family end up? Parricide--don't you see, it's just the 'brimstone' of some Moscow merchant's wife? The most precious, the most sacred precepts concerning the purpose and future of the Russian courts are presented perversely and frivolously, only to achieve a certain end, to achieve the acquittal of that which cannot be acquitted. 'Oh, overwhelm him with mercy,' the defense attorney exclaims, and that is just what the criminal wants, and tomorrow everyone will see how overwhelmed he is! And is the defense attorney not being too modest in asking only for the defendant's acquittal? Why does he not ask that a fund be established in the parricide's name, in order to immortalize his deed for posterity and the younger generatio ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As the component parts of all new machines may be said to be old[,] it is a nice discriminating judgment, which discovers that a particular arrangement will produce a new and desired effect ... Therefore, the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world. ~ Robert Fulton

The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down. ~ Toni Morrison

The AM were wicked bright and us a bit sick however we scored our wake ups boosting some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping and the snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of his old aquaintance from like the Cape and Poor Tony got over and pretended like he would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride with us and crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for true all day and crewed on him hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty's map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this ~ David Foster Wallace

A normal life. Such a simple idea, but it's almost impossible for me to picture. ~ Pittacus Lore

It would be a great advantage to a young man if his early training could eradicate the idea that the world has a great deal to offer him. But the usual result of education is to strenghten this delusion; and our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than from fact. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind's activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth. ~ Louis Agassiz

Sazed shook his head, walking over to stand beside her. "Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days, I think. What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure?" Vin frowned. "Anyone can believe in someone, or something, that always succeeds, Mistress. But failure ... ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value, I think. ~ Brandon Sanderson

To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions ~ George Orwell

The whole idea of WHAT HAPPENED WAS ... is not about dating. It is more about people who are not committed to who they are or are indifferent about their life in general, which is how I felt about myself when I wrote it. I had turned 40 and I was unhappy and I wanted to write about that. Dating just became the framework ... I like all those fringy, weird, nonverbal, quiet, tiny little things, those powerful interchanges between people, things that go unsaid, that people know are happening all the time but nobody wants to talk about. That's what I want to make movies about. ~ Tom Noonan

Not too long ago, I was speaking at Princeton, and some of the students asked me how they were to choose which issue of social justice is the most important. The question made me cringe. Issues? These issues have faces. We're talking not only about ideas but also about human emergencies. My response to the well-intentioned Princeton students was, Don't choose issues; choose people. Come play in the fire hydrants in North Philly. Fall in love with a group of people who are marginalized and suffering, and then you won't have to worry about which cause you need to protest. Then the issues will choose you. ~ Shane Claiborne

At eighteen Katharine had decided there was dignity in loneliness. In time the ideas had become synonymous in her mind, believing in the distance created between people, one could never be foolish.
"You can always come back," Siobhan said, "if the dark starts to frighten you."
But Katharine knew that wasn't true. ~ Deborah Valentine

I think the powerful would love less the fruits of violence if they had to deal it out by hand. ~ Anna Bright

The whole conception of man already endowed with a mind capable of conceiving civilization setting out to create it is fundamentally false. Man did not simply impose upon the world a pattern created by his mind. His mind is itself a system that constantly changes as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself to his surroundings. It would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into effect the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as our medieval forefathers or even our grandparents were able to foresee our manner of life today. ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, ... not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing. ~ Salman Rushdie

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. ~ H.L. Mencken

This therefore is Mathematics:
She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul;
She gives life to her own discoveries;
She awakens the mind and purifies the intellect;
She brings light to our intrinsic ideas;
She abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth ... ~ Proclus

Someday
When we are wiser
When the world's older
When we have learned
I pray
Someday we may yet
Live
To live and let live
Someday
Life will be fairer
Need will be rarer
Greed will not pay
Godspeed
This bright millennium
On its way
Let it come
Someday ~ Alan Menken

Another thing that seems quite helpful to the creative process is having babies. It does not detract at all from one's creativity. It reminds one that there is always more where that came from and there is never any shortage of ideas or of the ability to create. The process of being pregnant and then of having the baby and getting up in the night only puts one more in touch with this fecund part of one's self. ~ Fay Weldon

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned ~ George Santayana

From my perspective, music allows me to escape from the world of what is happening right in front of me ... to the world of my thoughts, my dreams, my hopes and ideas - for the world, for my own life, for the day, even for the moment. ~ Danielle De Niese

Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame was a great idea when it started, but I think they ought to close it, I think it's full. ~ Iggy Pop

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends. ~ Shel Silverstein

But after about a year praying, there was just this clear direction. The leadership team believed that God was leading us to focus on fatherhood. If God is leading, then God will provide. So we begin to get storyline ideas that lined up with the subject of fatherhood that we're working on and fitting, and we were thinking, okay this is good. At the same time, as we are studying scriptures and we're on our journey as fathers, we are learning about fatherhood every day. ~ Stephen Kendrick

He heard ideas the mention of which - the thought of which - was prohibited in the society he represented. He often brought the newspaper Granma with him. It was the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. And he would ask us to give him our reaction to things it printed. We would show him the doctrinaire objectives of the newspaper and the fact that the news was not really informative. ~ Armando Valladares

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

When you write songs you're commenting on love, you're commenting on sex, relationships, whatever it is that you decide to write about it. And I've wanted to write about politics or spiritual ideas for years. ~ Joan Jett

Tariq's eyes softened, their colors flickering in the shade. Their bright silver centers blended into rings of darkest ash, with black lashes that fanned against the soft skin of his eyelids. His brow had an air of severity that faded with the ready appearance of his smile. A day-old beard shadowed the square line of his jaw, further accentuating its finely wrought symmetry. ~ Renee Ahdieh

You can't really change somebody completely, deep inside your nature. But I think what I did was admit to myself what kind of a person I was, and sort of get into the idea that that's who I was. And I think preserving that part of myself really helps me make movies. ~ Takashi Miike

British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology. ~ Tom Turner