Steven Levy Quotes

I personally believe that a critical part to innovation is that exchange of ideas so when you say, 'Here's my idea,' someone else at the next table, who is in a different party, will go, 'Oh, these guys are trying that,' so that comes.

I enjoy a challenge or provocation, something to think about, to talk about after it's done.

I think it's good to meet smart people and talk.

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

I only surround myself with people who are intellectually stimulating.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

I love anything that really pushes the envelope as far as where it takes your mind. When it's well written and brings you into a world that possibly could be, I think that's the most entertaining for me - to see something that could actually take place and causes you to think.

Everyone has something to learn from one another. When different disciplines meet, it creates this amazing unpredictability.

You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

I like to make people think.

We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.

In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable moment.

Flood your life with ideas from many sources. Creativity needs to be exercised like a muscle. If you don't use it, you'll lose it!

A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

If NATURE has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... No one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.

Fun for us just happens to be screwing around with anything that gets our attention and is thought-provoking.

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

I'm the smartest at 8 A.M. I wake up at 6, drink three cups of Awake Tazo Tea and read five newspapers. I have to think up something every day, Monday to Friday.

They enjoy thinking. They enjoy being creative. They enjoy having ideas. Most people do not enjoy thinking at all.

I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that actually have an impact.