Original Thinking Quotes

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

The great creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible... But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators--the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed.

I try to seek out and surround myself with people who just percolate fresh, original, and creative ideas.

Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

'The Kumars'... played on five continents, and even when I came up with the idea, I was slightly surprised that no one else had.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

Genius: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!

The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.

You can't make experimental work by copying past work.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking

There is no need to create. Genius comes only to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

There is always room at the top but to arrive there and to stay there requires exceptional industry, exceptional qualifications and the courage to think along original lines.