Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

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.

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

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

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

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

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

Hugo, Victor

10.

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

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

13.

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

Lynch, David

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

Brown, Les

16.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

17.

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

18.

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

Penny, A. Owen

19.

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.

20.

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

Trotsky, Leon

21.

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

Cotvos

22.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

23.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

26.

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

27.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Kierkegaard, S�ren

28.

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

Simpson, E. L.

29.

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

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

31.

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

Townsend, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

Koysis, Ted

34.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

35.

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

36.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

37.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

38.

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

Hodges, Job E.

39.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

40.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

41.

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

Nelson, George

42.

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

Anatole France

43.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Keynes, John Maynard

44.

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

45.

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

Block, Henry

46.

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.

47.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

48.

It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

Canetti, Elias

49.

The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Bragg, Sir William

50.

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