Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

Kettering, Charles F.

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Eliot, George

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

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

Hector Berlioz

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Hugo, Victor

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

10.

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

James, William

11.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

12.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Pauling, Linus

13.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

14.

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

Anatole France

15.

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

Koysis, Ted

16.

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

17.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

18.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

21.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

22.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

23.

If you pray for only one thing, .let it be for an idea.

Sutton, Percy

24.

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

Maritain, Jacques

25.

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

Walter Bagehot

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

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

Chartier, Alain

28.

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Samuel Goldwyn

29.

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

30.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

31.

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.

32.

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

John Steinbeck

33.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

34.

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

35.

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

Block, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

Victor Hugo

38.

Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass, or they are gone.

Kennedy, Thomas F.

39.

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

Munro, J. Richard

40.

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

41.

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

Hortense Calisher

42.

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

43.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

46.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

47.

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

48.

The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.

49.

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

Rostand, Jean

50.

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

P. B. Medawar