Matt Ridley Quotes

Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.

I pick up inspiration from everywhere and it all manages to keep stored in my brain somewhere.

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.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.

I've found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that's where many people cultivate inspiration.

The most original minds borrowed from one another.

The great thing about ideas is that every new idea leads to two more new ones. It’s the opposite of a gold rush, where the more people who show up in 1849 to get that gold in California, the faster the gold runs out. Ideas are not like that; ideas breed.

I personally believe that a critical part to innovation is that exchange of ideas so when you say, 'Here's my idea,' someone else at the next table, who is in a different party, will go, 'Oh, these guys are trying that,' so that comes.

If you really want to step up your team's creative thinking, take a hard look at how many people you're putting in a room together. More than three to five is probably too many.

You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

I'll stop when I run out of ideas.

I have not come up with anything original. It needs a better brain than mine! I have done what I can do in taking Dawkins' idea and extending it.

We are apt to consider that invention is the result of spontaneous action of some heavenborn genius, whose advent we must patiently wait for, but cannot artificially produce. It is unquestionable, however, that education, legal enactments, and general social conditions have a stupendous influence on the development of the originative faculty present in a nation and determine whether it shall be a fountain of new ideas or become simply a purchaser from others of ready-made inventions.

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

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

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

Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.

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

It's a good idea to have a break, to let your mind rest and so you can start to cultivate ideas.

I have a creative mind, so if I listen to the song, I have an idea, I thought of five or six months ago, I'll bring it back into the playing field. I can tweak ideas or make them better. Just come up with something and then we go from there.

Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.