Idea Formation Quotes

The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

I usually write things in my head before I ever write them down. When I write it out, usually I've already figured out what it is I'm trying to do.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

The mind has three operations: the formation of ideas, judgements and reasoning.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas of leadership-such is the basic method of leadership.

I think he's informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven't the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed.

What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas but its earlier stages.

When you have well thought out your subject, words will come spontaneously.

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

Concepts antedate facts.

What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to have consequential thoughts is to start putting them down.

And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.

Once I've got something that I feel is strong, if I get long enough to think about it, it'll turn into something. I'll start thinking about the drums - what the drums are doing, what the bass is doing. Then, if I can remember it by the time I get to a recording device, it'll turn into a song.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Our ideas are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people …. This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.