Ideas Quotes - Page 440

I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

Certainly the Americans want to buy rights, but have no idea what to do with them.

It's never a good idea to ask a man on a tight-rope how he keeps his balance: a) he would probably fall off and b) he probably doesn't know what the muscles are called in any case.

I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff--well, if you could see them all in Heaven--serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add.

In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.

I was thinking about comedy and how comedy in many ways opens us up to ideas and really being influenced by Richard Pryor and sort of the way he would use comedy to really speak about larger social issues.

The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn't really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.

I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.

On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.

My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.

At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.

Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind.

It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.

I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.

All the other religions I had ever read about dealt with the idea of God, and your relationship with God. Buddhism is the only religion that deals with man himself and the nature of the mind - how to deal with yourself and your condition, here and now, as opposed to having to deal with something outside yourself.

We have met with the dharma. Many of us have met with teachers. We do have some idea of what to do and how to practice. And we should not be lazy.

My mother was a spiritualist. We had weekly séances at our house with a neighbor who was a medium and various friends, and so I was brought up with the idea that there are many realms of being all around us. So that prepared me for Buddhism, and especially Tibetan Buddhism with all its talk of different realms and dimensions of being.

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

The big idea behind it was to somehow participate in the discussion about justice. What does it mean to be just to the others out there whose lives we do not think about. One of the answers I came up with was simply tell their stories.

The shape the words end up taking are themselves the meaning of the words, they are retrospectively what we meant to say. There's no way of knowing this until you register it in visible form. But the other side of this is that you do have some idea of where you are going.