Saul Bellow Quotes

Thoughts and ideas are not phantoms. They are real things. Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

When ideas are communicated effectively, people follow and change.

The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.

An idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis.

People are more interested in ideas than dress.

You can make an idea spread for good but you can also make an idea spread for bad and the power to make an idea spread, memetics, you know which now people talk about memes.

This is ideological colonization. They colonize people with ideas that try to change mentalities or structures, but this is not new. This was done by the dictatorships of the last century.

An idea is, in the end, always stronger than circumstances.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

There's some people who say big philanthropy is not such a good idea, meaning that somehow you have enormous power and you're not elected and that that may not be such a good idea to have people with enormous wealth to have so much influence.

The idea itself, the notion of what the next Tron could be, is exciting enough that it would be worth going back to do it. Obviously we hinted some things at the end of Legacy, it's kind of there for people to see what that potential is. So we just want to make sure that we have a script that delivers on that promise on an epic scale."

But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.

I sell ideas. Actually, if you think about it, everything is really no more than idea. The past is nothing more than a memory, which is one kind of idea. The future is still a hope, another kind of idea. The present is fleeting and becomes a memory before you can put your hands on it. All ideas. I sell ideas.

Oh here's an idea: let's make pictures of our internal organs and give them to other people we love on Valentine's Day. That's not weird at all.

You don't want to be the smartest person in the room; you want to be the dumbest in the room. You want to be surrounded by other thinking people who are going to say something that makes you think, "Oh, my God, that's an amazing idea. Why didn't I think of that."

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.

All expectations belong to the mind, all disciplines belong to the mind, all so-called saintliness and so-called sin belong to the mind. When there is no mind, there is no sinner and no saint, and the gift simply showers on you.

There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

With this show [Stand-Up Revolution ], I loved the idea that I would be picking the talent that goes on, not the network. It was me handpicking people who might not have gotten the chance to be on TV. So, I thought it was real cool that I was putting people up there.