Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Marden, Orison Swett

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

Lynch, David

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

Marquis, Don

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

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Bachelard, Gaston

There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

P. B. Medawar

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

Niblack, Griff

10.

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

11.

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

Hyman Rickover

12.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

14.

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

15.

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin. It should make you jump up and do something.

Simpson, E. L.

16.

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.

Jones, Barry

17.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

William O. Douglas

19.

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

Nelson, George

20.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

21.

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.

22.

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

Brande, Dorothea

23.

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

Bunche, Ralph

24.

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

Maritain, Jacques

25.

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

Hector Berlioz

26.

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

27.

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

Berry, John

28.

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

Munro, J. Richard

29.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

30.

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

Cotvos

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

Rohn, Jim

34.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

35.

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

Koysis, Ted

36.

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

37.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

38.

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

Avery, Milton

39.

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

Everson, Ray D.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

Picasso, Pablo

44.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

45.

Many ideas are good for a limited time -- not forever.

Townsend, Robert

46.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

47.

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

Dogen

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

John Steinbeck