Making Ideas Happen Quotes

No great creative project can thrive (or even survive) off the energy of one person. ~ Scott Belsky

It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen. ~ Scott Belsky

[M]rs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It's all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other's understanding: but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little things just to see how they are growing. Half the verbal sprigs we hand each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature: left longer in the ground they might have come to something, but once they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the fault, no doubt, of the times we live in. Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feels, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation. ~ Jan Struther

When a country doesn't have a good economic infrastructure, that harms the country. With Stripe, the idea is that by providing better infrastructure, by linking the Internet economically, by making it easier for these online businesses to exist, it'll make the web better. ~ John Collison

Only business can build a low-carbon economy. Business is all about seeing ideas and growing them. Businesses have the resources, the people, the technical skills to make things happen - and they have the channels to market ~ Tom DeLay

I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen. ~ Rory Bremner

Making art, being creative, is risky, especially for actors, but everybody on the set is being creative. You're putting yourself out there with ideas, and to have your brain be free of stress so that it can actually do its best work, it feels like you want to have a real sense of intimacy and connection and trust with everybody. ~ Lynn Shelton

Something in every person objects to acknowledging the fact that he is not even "master in his own house".
The unconscious is un-conscious, and there's no bargaining on that score. The whole analytic therapy is based on the principle of making the unconscious conscious through an emotional therapeutic process, thus changing the unfavorable inner structure. All the misconceptions current about "self-analysis" via book knowledge are empty talk; self-analysis is a fancy word for arriving at wrong conclusions about one's own wonderful self. A psychiatric guide is needed for the descent into one's "inner hell". Psychoanalysis has always had the distinction of presenting unpalatable ideas. This fact is not based on some peculiar predilection of analysts but is inherent in analytic discoveries. Since our science deals with psychic material typically repressed (expelled from consciousness because too painful and shameful to remain conscious) the reaction of the conscious ego is an indignant "no". Facts, however, do not change by simple denial of them. ~ Edmund Bergler

I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn't have seen this space as sad-making and vacant - I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found. ~ Susan Orlean

The initial small step is simple: Rather than making a sweeping determination to tackle the Great Books (all of them), decide to begin on one of the reading lists in Part II. As you read each book, you'll follow the pattern of the trivium. First you'll try to understand the book's basic structure and argument; next, you'll evaluate the book's assertions; finally, you'll form an opinion about the book's ideas. You'll have to exercise these three skills of reading - understanding, analysis, and evaluation - differently for each kind of book. ~ Susan Wise Bauer

We have to remember that making money is essentially exchanging one form of energy for another form of energy - we are exchanging our ideas, our creativity, our passions, for money...we are asking people to take money out of their bank accounts and put into ours because our ideas and our creativity is more valuable to them than their money. ~ Osayi Emokpae Lasisi

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of. ~ David Lynch

Directing is a reactionary job more than a creation job. The job is to react whether it's moment one, the first time you read the script or see an article or read a book or notice something happen on the street and have an idea for a movie, and it just continues from there on in. You're just reacting to dialogue, a performance, an audition, a headache, a piece of furniture, a piece of clothing. ~ Jason Reitman

It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I'm not extravagant, so I won't need to rein it in too much. Me and my friend make each other cards. I love being creative and making things. But a better credit crunch idea is to not even bother sending cards. ~ Konnie Huq

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
... just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand. ~ Humphrey Carpenter

We live with a few familiar ideas. Two or three. We polish and transform them according to the societies and the men we happen to meet. ~ Albert Camus

Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories. ~ Adrienne Mayor

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper ... One idea and a few subordinate ideas - [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them - not let them escape you ... The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature. ~ Robert Frost

I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm not obstructing anyone's access. When I have a crowd I make sure that the crowd makes room for people. I'm an artist who cares about the cultural fabric of New York City. I care about New York as a harbor for street culture - and I care about street culture as a base-level populist diffusion of ideas. And I believe in making those ideas accessible to everyone. ~ Kalan Sherrard

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, ... ~ Malcolm Gladwell

A clear mission statement describes the values and priorities of an organization. Developing a mission statement compels strategists to think about the nature and scope of present operations and to assess the potential attractiveness of future markets and activities. A mission statement broadly charts the future direction of an organization. A mission statement is a constant reminder to its employees of why the organization exists and what the founders envisioned when they put their fame and fortune at risk to breathe life into their dreams. ~ Fred R. David

When you get quick fame and success and exposure, it makes you feel dizzy, and I didn't want to lose my balance 'cause that's something I've been struggling with for so many years. I'm not fond of the idea of making it in Hollywood. That's not my aim; otherwise, I would have settled down in Los Angeles. ~ Ludivine Sagnier

Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map - these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long. ~ Seth Godin

Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! ... The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description! ~ Alfred Binet

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth. ~ Carl Sagan

There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific. ~ Nicholson Baker

I believe that the most important thing for a couple of any sort, to realize in their relationship with each other (and please allow me to share this with you), is that neither are a limited source. You see, the idea of the soul is that it is eternal and that it continually receives from an Eternal Source. So the idea in any relationship is never really what you can get from it; but the idea is what you can give to the other, what you can put into it. Withdrawing from eternity - and depositing into the physical realm. Of course, as you both give, you are also both receiving from one another, thus a beautiful relationship is formed and maintained. It's that certain flow that needs to be encouraged and allowed. I say "allowed" because it's natural, however, it's usually not "allowed" because our human faculties are taught and bombarded by stupid ideas in magazines that relationships are all about what one can get from it; it's never about giving! So in a nutshell, the idea is to give because you know that you are receiving from an Everlasting Source, but to also remain graceful and eager enough to also receive gratefully from the other. And this is how eternal relationships are born. We are all conduits of eternity and we happen to meet another conduit whom we feel we belong with, then we share what we receive from eternity and receive what the other has to share. ~ C. JoyBell C.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm obsessed by the idea of making my mark on history. And Arsenal is my paradise. ~ Thierry Henry

There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past. ~ Tom Turner

Ideas are easy. I've never met a single person who didn't think they had a world class idea. The hard part is making it a business. ~ Mark Cuban

The idea that you can make love and not war really is pretty neat. That thing in Korea, the thing in Israel - that's all over the world. There must be a new way of thinking. ~ F. Murray Abraham

Are you persuaded of what you do or not? Do you need something to happen or not in order to do what you do? Do you need the correlations to coincide always, because the end is never in what you do, even if what you do is vast and distant but is always in your continuation? Do you say you are persuaded of what you do, no matter what? Yes? Then I tell you: tomorrow you will certainly be dead. It doesn't matter? Are you thinking about fame? About your family? But your memory dies with you,with you your family is dead. Are you thinking about your ideals? You want to make a will? You want a headstone? But tomorrow those too are dead, dead. All men die with you. Your death is an unwavering comet. Do you turn to god? There is no god, god dies with you. The kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead. Tomorrow everything is finished - your body, family, friends, country, what you're doing now, what you might do in the future, the good, the bad, the true, the false, your ideas, your little part, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, everything. Tomorrow everything is over - in twenty four hours is death.

Well, then the god of today is no longer yesterday's, no longer the country, the good, the bad, friends, or family. You want to eat? No, you cannot. The taste of food is no longer the same; honey is bitter, milk is sour, meat nauseating, and the odor, the odor sickens you: it reeks of the dead. You want a woman to comfort you in y ~ Carlo Michelstaedter

Here I am taking a psychological characteristic such as the need to know where in the world we are (orientation) and show that when this need was first made visible and expressed graphically the result was a cosmological map. The need for orientation may have been in the first place to relate persons spatially to the physical world in which they lived. But it was equally urgent to represent ideas about mankind's origin and future. Under the influence of anxiety and stress, outwardly perceptible reality may even have taken second place. The observer then visualized according to his preconceptions. This can still happen. At any rate, some early world maps were a ~ John Fielding

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making. ~ Thom Mayne

Those who keep sitting idle and waiting for miracles to happen cannot be a part of the process and hence, their ideas never get any closer to reality. ~ Prem Jagyasi

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses. ~ Winston Churchill

So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate - find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message - i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines. ~ Chip Heath

Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place. ~ John O'Keefe

People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

My first album was full of ideas and attempts to go in all kinds of directions. I was young. I loved making music, but I didn't have a clear path. I also lacked in confidence. ~ Yael Naim

I'm on a lot of airplanes, so I just sip on red wine thinking of stupid ideas and, when I think of it, I wanna make it happen. ~ Bam Margera

My job is to have new ideas and take risks every day, so I'm always looking forward to the next thing being done or making the next thing that I haven't yet gotten to. That's sort of the constant in my life. ~ Miranda July

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern. ~ Bill Bryson

[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it. ~ Danny Hillis

When I'm a part of someone else's creative process, it's all about facilitating their ideas and hopefully bringing their perspective and making it a part of a song. ~ Miguel

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. ~ Neil Gaiman

I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them? ~ Edwidge Danticat

Gary Ross is amazing. He's just - he always has a billion ideas of what he wants, but has a very clear perspective also; he just makes it work. He really does. He's trying different things and making everything look amazing. ~ Liam Hemsworth

Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory. If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. ~ Joshua Foer