A Quote by Saul Bellow
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Related Quotes
When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.
Don't you have much more faith in ideas that you discover for yourself than in ideas that are handed to you on a silver platter?
You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.
There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Don't treat your ideas like they're nothing, don't treat yourself like you're nothing, because you and your ideas are important and meaningful and have the potential to become so much more than you realize.
People get ideas of how to live or not to live from what you do on television.
How long we live is much more important than how well we live!
Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.
If we're going to save the planet, people are going to have to live in ways that don't require so much energy and don't create as much waste. The only way to do that is to live more densely than Americans are living right now.
The more you realize, the more you realize how much there is to realize and, at the same time, how much you realize that there is nothing to realize. So, it's an enormous job, not something that is going to be finished in this lifetime.
We don't live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union's; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.
The younger generations have their own ideas, they have their own projects. When they talk, I am always surprised how much more lucid and cultivated they are and how they see things in a way that is much more complex than, for example, other generations did.
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
When you become sufficiently expert in the state of the art, you stop picking ideas at random. You are thoughtful in how to select ideas and how to combine ideas. You are thoughtful about when you should be generating many ideas versus pruning down ideas.
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.
If you're trying to live life, really live it, you should, in my opinion, try to expand all the aspects of your life. Open yourself to new ideas and new things even if you find you don't like them in the end - but at least knowing them has taken you that much further along into being a more experienced, more well-rounded person in this world.
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