Jean Dubuffet Quotes

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

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

All our thinking is of this nature, a free play with concepts.

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

I've always been interested in visualizing something, whether it's a memory or an idea you want to be true. I am a big believer in that. I'm constantly thinking of that. If I can't picture something, then it doesn't make sense to me.

Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.

The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

When I am kicking around show ideas, or really any idea, usually an image comes to me. I don't really start with a character or a logline like, "What if the electricity turned off?"

A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Rain on my head, call that brainstorming.

The region belonging to the pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the boarders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, 'The imagination is the stuff of the intellect' -affords, that is, the material upon which the intellect works.

If we trace the progress of our minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites its simple ideas received from sensation or reflection, it will lead us farther than at first, perhaps, we should have imagined.

There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and then, oh, unconscious cerebration.

Thought engenders thought. Place one idea on paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page; you cannot fathom your mind. There is a well of thought which has no bottom; the more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful it will be.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

Imagination comes in after we have experience.

To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.

Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.