Motivational Quotes

Ideas

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

- Anatole France

Best Quotes about Ideas

Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.

Hodges, Job E.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Anatole France

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

P. B. Medawar

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

10.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

11.

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.

Whitehead, Alfred North

12.

Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.

Cotvos

13.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man. --

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas, If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed.

Schuller, Robert H.

15.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

Clarke, Arthur C.

16.

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

Grinde, Bob

17.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

18.

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

Paolo Giordano

19.

Think for thyself one good idea, but known to be thine own, is better than a thousand gleaned from fields by others sown.

Wilson, Alexander

20.

It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

Canetti, Elias

21.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calisher

22.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Eliot, George

23.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H. L. Mencken

24.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

25.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

26.

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... 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.

Foucault, Michel

27.

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.

Oech, Roger Von

28.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

29.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Keynes, John Maynard

30.

We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.

Block, Henry

31.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

33.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

Rohn, Jim

34.

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

William O. Douglas

35.

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.

Decter, Midge

36.

The simple joy of taking an idea into one's own hands and giving it proper form, that's exciting.

Nelson, George

37.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage

38.

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

Kettering, Charles F.

39.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.