Stephen Hawking Quotes

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.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

Sometimes even hearing a bad idea is a great way to get to a good idea.

Coming up with ideas is really hard - they don't spontaneously pop into my head while I'm cutting vegetables.

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Creative ideas aren't like Jenga blocks, where they fall apart and you've got to start from scratch, though it can feel that way.

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

The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.

I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

I repeat it until it works. It is important to record, otherwise you lose ideas. That's why I never stay away from the studio, I always [have] something to ask.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.

I have lots of ideas. Trouble is, most of them suck.

I tend to [have] a lot of ideas but then just leave them in that infant form and kind of move on.

I like to really spend the time and figure it out and rehearsal is to try something that doesn't work. It's hard to do that, because you always want to go with your impulse thought and you wonder if that's the one, did that work, you know?

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.

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.

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

We fail when we try to give simple answers to complicated problems.

It's important not to overstate the benefits of ideas. Quite frankly, I know it's kind of a romantic notion that you're just going to have this one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great. But the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of creating something great. It has to be the right idea and have good taste, but the execution and delivery are what's key.

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.

You can't just have a thought. You have to follow the thought through. But everything starts with the thought.