Jonah Peretti Quotes

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Sometimes the best ideas will come in the least inspiring places.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's cheesy' or 'What do you think of this?'

There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.

In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have - not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

Engineering stimulates the mind.

My joking answer to this question is that I leave a bowl of milk out on the back porch every night for the Idea Fairy. In the morning, the milk is gone and there's a brand-new shiny idea by the bowl.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

I believe that the ability to innovate and to be creative are teachable processes. There are ways by which people can systematically innovate or systematically become creative.