A Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Quote Topics

About Done Ideas Keep Must Something Them

Quote Author

Alfred North Whitehead
English - Mathematician
February 15, 1861 - December 30, 1947

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

Alfred North Whitehead

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

Guy Davenport

If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.

Brenda Ueland

Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.

Samuel Butler

My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light...And to put resources in to support them. Keep finding ideas. That's the job of just about all of our CEOs.

Jack Welch

We must not pull away from our children. We must keep trying, keep reaching, keep praying, keep listening. We must keep them within the clasp of our arms.

Jeffrey R. Holland

A lot of the time, you need to find the right home for ideas. You know, sometimes you think 'oh this'd be a sitcom, oh, no it wouldn't, it'd be a drama, or an educational thing, or a doco or something.' I've got loads of ideas and you just have to keep sending them and pitching them.

Bill Bailey

There is this great idea about the logic of a politician, along the lines of: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.

Antony Jay

There must be something about art... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.

Roy Lichtenstein

I had a history for starting something and maybe getting halfway done. Then I'd see the same thing I was doing on the bestseller list! My ideas were right, but I hadn't done them fast enough.

Lori Greiner

And we should forget, day by day, what we have done; this is true non-attachment. And we should do something new. To do something new, of course we must know our past, and this is alright. But we should not keep holding onto anything we have done; we should only reflect on it. And we must have some idea of what we should do in the future. But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new.

Shunryu Suzuki

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.

Alfred North Whitehead

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

Kurt Vonnegut

I also knew that if people have a position on something and you try to argue them into changing it, you’re going to strengthen that position. If you want to change people’s ideas, you shouldn’t try to convince them intellectually. What you need to do is get them into a situation where they’ll have to act on ideas not argue about them.