Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

- Brown, Ron

Best Quotes about Ideas

Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

Carnegie, Dale

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

Rivarol, Antoine

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courageous patience.

Rickover, Hyman G.

The point, simply, is that we are doing more rediscovering these days than discovering coming anew upon truths that ignorant people refused to examine, over the centuries, because the wise people who held custody of the fundamental truths of nature were unpopular.

Williamson, John

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

P. B. Medawar

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

Hodges, Job E.

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

10.

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

11.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Whitehead, Alfred North

12.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

13.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

14.

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.

Trotsky, Leon

15.

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

16.

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

Eliot, George

17.

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.

18.

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

Walter Bagehot

19.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

20.

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

Frost, Robert

21.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

22.

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

Nelson, George

23.

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

24.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover

25.

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

Saunders, Richard

26.

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

27.

Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil.

Baruch, Bernard M.

28.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

29.

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

Brown, Les

30.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

31.

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

Hortense Calisher

32.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Rorty, Richard

33.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

34.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

35.

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

36.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

38.

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

Bacon, Francis

39.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O'Keeffe

40.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Bachelard, Gaston

41.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

42.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

43.

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

Berry, John

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

47.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

48.

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

Lynch, David

49.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

James, William

50.

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz