Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edgard Varese

There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces.

Edith Hamilton

One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change it would be dead. ... Each time the new ideas appear they are seen at first as a deadly foe threatening to make religion perish from the earth; but in the end there is a deeper insight and a better life with ancient follies and prejudices gone.

Holbrook Jackson

As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it.

Holly Black

It's not that I don't know that it's a bad idea. It's that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other directions by the change of external stimuli and by ideas.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together

Hermann Weyl

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

Hermann von Helmholtz

The smallest quantity of alcohol scares away novel ideas.

Hermann Hesse

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

Henry Steele Commager

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.

Henri Poincare

For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

Henri Poincare

I then began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connexion with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.

Henri Poincare

I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.

Henri Poincare

Often when works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, long or short, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.

Henri Matisse

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Henri Nouwen

In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.

Heinrich Rohrer

To my knowledge significant progress has never been born of competition. ... In science, being 'better' than others is of little practical value. Examples of how absurd the idea of scientific competition is are abundant.

Heinrich Mann

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

Heidi Julavits

I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive!

Hippolyte Taine

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

Hjalmar Schacht

The aim and the idea of the Four Year Plan were and remain entirely correct and necessary!

Hjalmar Branting

At Geneva, the neutral states were often in agreement concerning the preliminaries for Genoa, and Genoa itself was marked by a quite natural mutual exchange of ideas.

Henry Ford

The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time.

Heinrich Heine

Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea.

Heather O'Neill

All writers have the idea that they are famous.

Hilary Mantel

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

Hilary Mantel

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

Henry Ward Beecher

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Henry Ward Beecher

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

Henry James

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

Helene Cixous

... explore the idea of what the language that women speak would really be like if no one were there to correct them...

Helen Fielding

Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes. But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered.