Idea Origin Quotes

The actual and valuable material of all human utterances —is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.

The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.

Ideas, like large rivers, never have just one source.

In L.A., anytime a show is a success, people come out of the woodwork claiming they had the idea first.

Every piece of technology, every piece of art, basically everything manmade comes from an idea.

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to whom the idea first occurs.

A good thought is indeed a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked; next he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the friend who is the first to quote it to us. Whoever adopts and circulates a just thought, participates in the merit that originated it.

Scepticism, like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its growth, unless we track its seed to the power which sowed it.

I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.

Well, this is shortly after the idea was put to me because it wasn't my idea to do a Christmas record. We can talk about that a little bit, if you like, later on. But I wrote that song actually about two days after the idea was put to me.