Ideas - Quotes
People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven`t you?
Having lots of ideas doesn`t mean you`re clever, any more than having lots of soldiers means you`re a good general.
I don't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there's nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
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.
Having too many ideas is not always a good thing. It’s too easy to move on to the next one, and the next one. If you don’t have many ideas, you have to make those you do have
work for you.
If an idea is not taken up and used as a solution to a problem it has no value. It becomes a non-idea. Lying in a drawer it is useless. Worse than useless, it’s a complete waste of space. Ideas have to be applied before they are recognized as good ideas. Even a bad idea executed Is better than a good idea undone. The longer it is used the better the idea is considered to be. That is why the wheel is reckoned to be the best idea ever.
In the development of mathematical ideas, one important initial driving force has always been to find mathematical structures that accurately mirror the behaviour of the physical world. But it is normally not possible to examine the physical world itself in such precise detail that appropriately clear-cut mathematical notions can be abstracted directly from it. Instead, progress is made because mathematical notions tend to have a "momentum" of their own that appears to spring almost entirely from within the subject itself. Mathematical ideas develop, and various kinds of problem seem to arise naturally.
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don`t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It`s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.