Great Ideas Quotes (page 8)
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I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.
Johnny Depp
A critical assumption is sometimes made that [Grisham, Clancey, Crichton & myself] have access to some mystical vulgate that other (and often better) writers cannot find or will not deign to use. I doubt if this is true. Nor do I believe the contention of some popular novelists... that thier success is based on literary merit -- that the public understands true greatness in ways the tight-a**ed, consumed-by-jealousy literary establishment cannot. This idea is ridiculous, a product of vanity...
Stephen King
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,? What is truth? and of the affections,? What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can't stay long, Mother," he said. "I'm up front, the prefects have got two compartments to themselves-"Oh, are you a prefect, Percy?" said one of the twins, with an air of great surprise. "You should have said something, we had no idea."Hang on, I think I remember him saying something about it," said the other twin. "Once-"Or twice-"A minute-"All summer-"Oh, shut up," said Percy the Prefect.
J. K. Rowling
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.
Jorge Luis Borges
Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past fading out, are in an idea like that of the external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very emphatically an external soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
... yet, even before he left the room, - and certainly, not five minutes after, the clear conviction dawned upon her, shined bright upon her, that he did love her; that he had loved her; that he would love her. And she shrank and shuddered as under the fascination of some great power, repugnant to her whole previous life. She crept away, and hid from his idea. But it was of no use
Elizabeth Gaskell
The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off. There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we...
Terry Prachett
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
Edward Bellamy
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
Join the bold, the brazen, the unintimidated. Join not having excuses. Join the idea that fun is the source of all joy. Join the unwillingness to give up. Join doing things your way. Join not joining. Join that purpose is stronger than outcome. Join your gut. Join the constant challenge of seeking greatness. Join play. Join the hunger to find what makes you happy. Join karma and nature and the effect you have on your world. Join your philosophy. Join something bigger than you. Join what you...
Bode Miller