Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Brown, Les

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

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

Saunders, Richard

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

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

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.

10.

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

James, William

11.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

12.

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

Bunche, Ralph

13.

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

Horton, Doug

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

16.

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

Lynch, David

17.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

23.

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

P. B. Medawar

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

29.

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

Cotvos

30.

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

31.

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

Jim Hightower

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

35.

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

Townsend, Robert

36.

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

Canetti, Elias

37.

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

38.

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

Eliot, George

39.

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.

40.

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

Rohn, Jim

41.

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

Simpson, E. L.

42.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

43.

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

Hortense Calisher

44.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

45.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

46.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

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.

48.

Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

50.

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

Hector Berlioz