Sol LeWitt Quotes

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas: facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas.

I like the life of ideas and applying ideas to action.

Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

At the root of everything I do is a fascination with ideas - what ideas are for, what jobs they do.

The specious figments of genius, and the erratic flights of philosophy, may excite our wonder, but they cannot stand the ordeal of scrutiny, or the Lydian touch of experiment.

It's difficult to innovate, but you must try to create a project under your ideas and philosophies to take you ahead of other clubs.

It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

Ideas are always more important than money.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.

Technique bridges among ideas, and sometimes generates them.

Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

When entering on new ground we must not be afraid to express even risky ideas so as to stimulate research in all directions. As Priestley put it, we must not remain inactive through false modesty based on fear of being mistaken.

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.

Now the word-symbols of conceptual ideas have passed so long from hand to hand in the service of the understanding, that they have gradually lost all such fanciful reference.

Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.