Motivational Quotes

Ideas

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

- Caird, Mona

Best Quotes about Ideas

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.

Bach, Richard

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

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

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

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

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Pound, Ezra

11.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

14.

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

Victor Hugo

15.

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

16.

Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.

Harris, Sidney J.

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

19.

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

Einstein, Albert

20.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

21.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

22.

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

Lynch, David

23.

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

Anatole France

24.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

26.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Hyman Rickover

30.

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

Block, Henry

31.

It's a pretty good idea to be of good cheer but not all the time. Just at the most unexpected times.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane

35.

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

Eliot, George

36.

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

37.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

38.

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

William O. Douglas

39.

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

Bunche, Ralph

40.

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

James, William

41.

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

42.

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

Hector Berlioz

43.

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

44.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

45.

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

Munro, J. Richard

46.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Maritain, Jacques

47.

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

Everson, Ray D.

48.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Hill, Napoleon

49.

Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.

Butler, Samuel

50.

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