Ideas Quotes - Page 29

• . . . 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

  Powerful, Writing, Dating

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• I firmly believe in and support everyone's right to freedom of artistic expression. STEEL MAGNOLIAS is my artistic expression, and it is my right to say that its female characters be portrayed by women. The concept of a play set in a beauty parlor where men portray women is a terrific idea. If that is someone's artistic expression, I encourage them to write their own play as soon as possible.

  Robert Harling

  Believe, Writing, Character

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• . . . [T]hese [ideas] are only suggestions of the evil spirit who, to jeopardize your salvation, suggests to you extraordinary works that are beyond your strength, under the fine pretext of practicing, on your own, the spiritual and corporal works of mercy . . .

  Vincent de Paul

  Faith, Spiritual, Evil

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• It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.

  Thomas Keneally

  Jesus, Wall, Passion

  Thomas Keneally (1982). “Schindler's list”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end.

  Stephen King

  Religious, Believe, Thinking

  Stephen King (2017). “Pet Sematary: A Novel”, p.253, Simon and Schuster

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• It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about.

  Stephen King

  Two, People, Imagination

  Stephen King (2008). “Lisey's Story: A Novel”, p.338, Simon and Schuster

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• Men who have excessive faith in their theories ... make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat

  Claude Bernard

  Science, Men, Wish

  Claude Bernard, Henry Copley Greene (1957). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.38, Courier Corporation

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• We must become free. We are free; the work is to know it. We must give up all slavery, all bondage of whatever kind. We must not only give up our bondage to earth and everything and everybody on earth, but also to all ideas of heaven and happiness.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Giving Up, Heaven, Slavery

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2581, Manonmani Publishers

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• The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. ... In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new.

  William Thurston

  Math, Community, Understanding

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• The world of ideas is not revealed to us in one stroke; we must both permanently and unceasingly recreate it in our consciousness.

  Rene Thom

  Math, World, Consciousness

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• Mathematicians can and do fill in gaps, correct errors, and supply more detail and more careful scholarship when they are called on or motivated to do so. Our system is quite good at producing reliable theorems that can be solidly backed up. It's just that the reliability does not primarily come from mathematicians formally checking formal arguments; it comes from mathematicians thinking carefully and critically about mathematical ideas.

  William Thurston

  Math, Thinking, Errors

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• Mathematics is about problems, and problems must be made the focus of a student's mathematical life. Painful and creatively frustrating as it may be, students and their teachers should at all times be engaged in the process - having ideas, not having ideas, discovering patterns, making conjectures, constructing examples and counterexamples, devising arguments, and critiquing each other's work.

  Paul Lockhart

  Teacher, Math, Focus

  "A Mathematician's Lament". Book by Paul Lockhart, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2009.

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• Combinatorics is an honest subject. No adèles, no sigma-algebras. You count balls in a box, and you either have the right number or you haven't. You get the feeling that the result you have discovered is forever, because it's concrete. Other branches of mathematics are not so clear-cut. Functional analysis of infinite-dimensional spaces is never fully convincing; you don't get a feeling of having done an honest day's work. Don't get the wrong idea - combinatorics is not just putting balls into boxes. Counting finite sets can be a highbrow undertaking, with sophisticated techniques.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Cutting, Math, Numbers

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• This common and unfortunate fact of the lack of adequate presentation of basic ideas and motivations of almost any mathematical theory is probably due to the binary nature of mathematical perception. Either you have no inkling of an idea, or, once you have understood it, the very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud.

  Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

  Motivation, Math, Perception

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• What is the fundamental hypothesis of science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. ... If we are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Philosophy, Math, Trying

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• Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.

  Bertrand Russell

  Math, Men, May

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• Why do I act as I do? To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea why. It is simply my nature to act as I act, and that's all I can say.

  Raymond Smullyan

  Math, No Idea, I Can

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• The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature.

  Peter L. Bernstein

  Math, Men, Past

  Peter L. Bernstein (2012). “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk”, p.11, John Wiley & Sons

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• New facts often trigger new ideas

  T.L. Osborn

  Education, Facts, Mathematics

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• We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Travel, Ocean

  Henry David Thoreau (1866). “Cape Cod”, p.174

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• If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

  Allan Nevins

  Art, Past, History

  Allan Nevins (1975). “Allan Nevins on history”

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• The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.

  Biz Stone

  Moving, Bird, Flight

  "Twitter Cofounder Biz Stone Interview at Wisdom 2.0" by Soren Gordhamer, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 5, 2012.

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• I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.

  Margaret Atwood

  Flower, Thinking, Bird

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.128, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Books are good but they are only maps. Reading a book by direction of a man I read that so many inches of rain fell during the year. Then he told me to take the book and squeeze it between my hands. I did so and not a drop of water came from it. It was the idea only that the book conveyed. So we can get good from books, from the temple, from the church, from anything, so long as it leads us onward and upward.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Rain, Book, Reading

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.920, Manonmani Publishers

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• If religion and life depend upon books or upon the existence of any prophet whatsoever, then perish all religion and books! Religion is in us. No books or teachers can do more than help us to find it, and even without them we can get all truth within. You have gratitude for books and teachers without bondage to them; and worship your Guru as God, but do not obey him blindly; love him all you will, but think for yourself. No blind belief can save you, work out your own salvation. Have only one idea of God - that He is an eternal help.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Teacher, Gratitude, Book

  Swami Vivekananda (1953). “Complete Works”

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