ideas

1.

Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job, even spend the day in pajamas, and often meet to gossip or share ideas. On the other hand, we bossed ourselves around, set impossible goals, and demanded longer hours than office jobs usually entail. It was the ultimate "flextime," in that it depended on how flexible we felt each day, given deadlines, distractions, and workaholic crescendos.

- Diane Ackerman

2.

Rather than denying problems, focus inventively, intentionally on what solutions might look or feel like...Our mind is meant to generate ideas that help us escape circumstantial traps -- if we trust it to do so. Naturally, not all hunches are useful. But then you only need a single good idea to solve a problem.

- Sinetar, Marsha

3.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

4.

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

- Eric Hoffer

5.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

- Beecher, Henry Ward

6.

The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more popular in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion...expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew.

- Walter Truett Anderson - "Reality Isn't What it Used to Be"

7.

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

- Miriam Beard

8.

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

- Klemens Von Metternich

9.

Everyone is in business for himself, for he is selling his services, labor or ideas. Until one realizes that this is true he will not take conscious charge of his life and will always be looking outside himself for guidance.

- Sidney Madwed

10.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

- Herschel, Sir John

11.

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

- Marquis, Don

12.

Reason and emotion are not antagonists. What seems like a struggle is a struggle between two opposing ideas or values, one of which, automatic and unconscious, manifests itself in the form of a feeling.

- Nathaniel Brandon

13.

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin. It should make you jump up and do something.

- Simpson, E. L.

14.

The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.

- Judge John Kane

15.

When I am.. . completely myself, entirely alone. . . or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these come I know not nor can I force them. . . Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them gleich alles zusammen (at the same time all together).

- Wolfgang AmadeusMozart

16.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

- H. L. Mencken

17.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

- Mann, Thomas

18.

The people who oppose your ideas the most are those who represent the establishment that your ideas will upset.

- Anthony J. D'Angelo

19.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

- Jim Hightower

20.

Whenever I hear people talking about "liberal ideas," I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe