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Idea Quotes

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Idea Quotes

“Your opinion of your mental capacity may be great, but if your idea of intelligence is crude, your intelligence-producing thought will also be crude, and can produce only crude intelligence. It is therefore evident that to simply think that you are brilliant will not produce brilliancy, unless your understanding of brilliancy is made larger, higher and finer. …. When your thinking is brilliant, you will be brilliant, but if your thinking is not brilliant you will not be brilliant, no matter how brilliant you may think you are.”

“Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.”

“I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.”

“Our culture has an idea of competition in the pursuit of excellence that can make anyone not striving for the top feel like a worthless, non-productive bystander. This applies not only to one's career but even to one's leisure.”

“Death is the truth of the 21st century and we know that it was the truth of the older centuries as well but it may not be the truth of the next day or the next year or the next centuries ahead! Why? Because we have created the idea of immortality and once we think of something, once an idea is created, it will appear in reality sooner or later!”

“{Recalling Professor Ira Remsen's remarks (1895) to a group of his graduate students about to go out with their degrees into the world beyond the university:} He talked to us for an hour on what was ahead of us; cautioned us against giving up the desire to push ahead by continued study and work. He warned us against allowing our present accomplishments to be the high spot in our lives. He urged us not to wait for a brilliant idea before beginning independent research, and emphasized the fact the Lavoisier's first contribution to chemistry was the analysis of a sample of gypsum. He told us that the fields in which the great masters had worked were still fruitful; the ground had only been scratched and the gleaner could be sure of ample reward.”