Logo - Feel The Words

Formulate Quotes

Turning questions into answers, one idea at a time.

These quotes explore what it means to formulate an idea, from framing a scientific concept to asking a novel question you cannot yet answer. Several reflect on how the act of formulating a thought stretches the mind and often leads somewhere unexpected.

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

Quotes by William Inge

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such...

Quotes by Werner Heisenberg

By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.

Quotes by Walter Gilbert

Who better to help formulate and to lead debate on fighting ISIS and Islamic extremists than an Arabic-speaking former CIA case officer who has been fighting the war on terrorism?

Quotes by Todd Wilcox

Able Quotes

Being a good listener is more than just being quiet. It's reflecting back on what you're hearing. It's processing the information to formulate a question, a comment or a speech.

Quotes by Shelley Moore Capito

It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how...

Quotes by Sebastian Maniscalco

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's...

Quotes by Ron Howard

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

Quotes by Robert Pinsky

Without constantly pushing my senior colleagues to formulate decisions, I would never be able to learn and know what they are made of.

Quotes by Peter Woo

Character Quotes

The old series of sittings with Mrs. Piper convinced me of survival for reasons which I should find it hard to formulate in any strict fashion, but that was their distinct effect.

Quotes by Oliver Joseph Lodge

I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters...

Quotes by Maryanne Wolf

One of my favorite things to do is formulate powers for a character, then come up with their corresponding weaknesses and liabilities. And I delight in world-building: melding the supernatural with the natural, then tweaking and polishing until it feels...

Quotes by Kresley Cole

A lot of people who have been perceiving my music have been trying to formulate a genre for it, and I think it's just a natural thing; it doesn't need to be categorized. It doesn't need to be sectioned, if...

Quotes by King Krule

The time has come to formulate guidelines for the ethical conduct of scientist, perhaps in the form of a voluntary Hippocratic Oath.

Quotes by Joseph Rotblat

Come Quotes

You can't teach standup comedy. You can teach someone how to formulate a joke, but making it funny is different.

Quotes by Jermaine Fowler

During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.

Quotes by Hope Jahren

A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.

Quotes by Herbert Read

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.

Quotes by Herbert A. Simon

I was looking for someone to formulate a skin care line I could use.

Quotes by Connie Sellecca

Good Quotes

Similarly, only people as misanthropic as myself can be counted on not to have to lie to others, since we have the unique luxury of not caring what sort of opinions others formulate about us.

Quotes by Boyd Rice

Frequently Asked Questions

What are these formulate quotes about?
This page collects quotes about the act of formulating ideas — turning a vague thought, question, or observation into something clearly defined, whether in science, writing, or everyday problem-solving.
Why would someone search for quotes about formulating ideas?
People look for these quotes when they want language for the mental work of shaping a plan, an argument, or a theory, especially at the early, uncertain stage before an idea takes solid form.
How do these quotes connect formulating ideas to curiosity?
One central idea here is that asking a question you don't yet know how to answer is valuable in itself, because trying to formulate a path toward an answer stretches your thinking and can lead to real discoveries.
Do any quotes touch on formulating ideas in science specifically?
Yes — one pushes back on the assumption that scientific concepts come purely from empirical data, suggesting that formulating a mathematical or scientific idea also involves a more active, constructive process.
Is formulating always described as a deliberate, careful process?
Not entirely — some quotes suggest it can also be instinctive, comparing it to how even animals might formulate belief systems if they were able to, hinting the impulse to organize ideas runs deeper than pure logic.

Formulating an idea takes a certain kind of Character — the willingness to be wrong before being right — and several quotes tie that process to asking Good questions rather than settling for easy answers.