Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Get your ideas on paper and study them. Do not let them go to waste!

- Brown, Les

Best Quotes about Ideas

The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.

Avery, Milton

Great people talk about ideas. Small people talk about other people.

Gibson, Tobias S.

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

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

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

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

Lewis, Wyndham

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

Bridgman, P. W.

10.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

11.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

12.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

13.

A new idea is like a child. It's easier to conceive than to deliver.

Koysis, Ted

14.

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

Einstein, Albert

15.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Edison, Thomas A.

16.

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

17.

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.

Bunche, Ralph

18.

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.

19.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

20.

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Rostand, Jean

21.

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

22.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

Gide, Andre

23.

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

Block, Henry

24.

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

You have to hatch ideas -- and then hitch them.

Everson, Ray D.

26.

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

27.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

28.

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

John Cage

29.

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

30.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

31.

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.

Saunders, Richard

32.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

33.

The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.

Lynch, David

34.

Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride by on air. You've only to reach out and snatch one...

Mckeun, Rod

35.

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

Eliot, George

36.

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Sir Frederick G. Banting

37.

A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.

Twain, Mark

38.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Jim Hightower

39.

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

Mason, Ken

40.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

41.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

42.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

43.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

44.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

45.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

46.

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

Brande, Dorothea

47.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

Rivarol, Antoine

48.

It first appeared like a crazy idea. It turned out he had a great idea.

Munro, J. Richard

49.

In Texas, years ago, almost all of the oil came from surface operations. Then someone got the idea that there were greater sources of supply deeper down. A well was drilled five thousand feet deep. The result? A gusher. Too many of us operate on the surface. We never go deep enough to find supernatural resources. The result is, we never operate at our best. More time and investment is involved to go deep but a gusher will pay off.

Montapert, Alfred A.

50.

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

Berry, John