Ernest Andre Gellner Quotes

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

You don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.

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.

That is the trouble with many inventors; they lack patience. They lack the willingness to work a thing out slowly and clearly and sharply in their mind, so that they can actually "feel it work." They want to try their first idea right off; and the result is they use up lots of money and lots of good material, only to find eventually that they are working in the wrong direction. We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

You have to draw on a fair amount of experience in order to be able to put ideas together.

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

I'll stop when I run out of ideas.

If coming up with ten ideas sounds too hard, then come up with twenty.

When we sit down to work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them.

Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who's going to have a great idea.

If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.

In a highly critical, scarcity-based world, everyone's afraid to fail. As long as we're afraid to fail, we'll never come up with the big, bold ideas we need to solve these problems.

Technique bridges among ideas, and sometimes generates them.

Without theory we can only copy.

All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.

An idea is a feat of association.

there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. N my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don't work, so I have to give it up.

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