Motivational Quotes

Ideas

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

- Corey, Arthur F.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Einstein, Albert

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

Williamson, Marianne

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

Saunders, Richard

Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied.

Glasgow, Arnold H.

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

Hector Berlioz

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

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

John Steinbeck

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

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

Brown, Les

10.

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

Bunche, Ralph

11.

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.

12.

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

Picasso, Pablo

13.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

14.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

15.

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

Block, Henry

16.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

17.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

18.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Rostand, Jean

22.

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

John Cage

23.

Mere words are cheap and plenty enough, but ideas that rouse and set multitudes thinking come as gold for the mines.

Penny, A. Owen

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

26.

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

Eliot, George

27.

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

28.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

31.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

32.

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

Howard Aiken

33.

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

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.

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

36.

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

Hugo, Victor

37.

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

38.

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

Hugo, Victor

39.

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

Maritain, Jacques

40.

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

Jim Hightower

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.

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

43.

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

Rohn, Jim

44.

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

45.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

46.

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

Munro, J. Richard

47.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

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

Butler, Samuel

49.

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

Nelson, George

50.

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