I know it's a silly idea, but it seems like it might be useful. I've played with random quote dispensers in the past, and if they have a good list of quotes to start with they can be surprisingly useful, in my experience - the quote might be useless 9 times out of 10, but that tenth time, when it makes you realize that a connection exists that you never would have noticed otherwise, is pretty awesome.

So something like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies?

I've found them useful in the past; interestingly, I get a similar effect with spaced repetition - more than once a quote or factoid has come up and I suddenly see how it fits somewhere or what it's really saying.