Ideas Quotes - Page 119

I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life.

If you are going to make a change, don't go halfway. Make it with conviction and stick with your new idea. Ignore the scoffers. Remember, it is a law of nature that if something is different you're going to be taunted, jeered, and told the world is flat. Let the doubters fall off the edge.

But the safety of the world, in some sense, depends on your saying no to inhumane ideas. Standing up for one's own integrity makes you no friends. It is costly. Yet defiance of the mob, in the service of that which is right, is one of the highest expressions of courage I know.

Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.

Act with integrity. Live up to your idea of who you are.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

I remember I went to an exhibition somewhere and one of the artists, an Iranian lady, said, "I wish we had somewhere that our paintings would stay forever." So this idea came to me. I said, "She's right, we should have a place to keep them, and not only Iranian art works, but also of foreign artists."

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

I don't capture moments, I capture ideas.

One day I think it's the greatest idea ever that I'm working on. The next day I think it's the worst that I've ever worked on - and I swing between that a lot. Some days I'm very happy with what I'm doing, and the next day I am desperate - it's not working out!

How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole.

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.

I find that what doubt does, or fear, is it makes you come up with as many ideas as you possibly can. And on film that works 'cause you're then handing over that fear to the director, who has to make sense of all those options!

Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.

I have always been fascinated by structure and by exploring its possibilities. Throughout my life as a designer and maker, my structures have progressively become lighter and lighter, to the point now where I wonder how I can just sell the idea without any physical form. This seems to parallel human development where, as our bodies age, physicality is replaced by conceptualising and spirituality.

I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.

I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself.

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.

Ever since I began working with toys, I have been intrigued with the idea that these seemingly benign objects could take on such incredible power and personality simply by the way they were photographed. I began to realize that by carefully selecting the depth of field and making it narrow, I could create a sense of movement and reality that was in fact not there