Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Eliot, George

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Brande, Dorothea

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

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

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

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

Hector Berlioz

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

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

Einstein, Albert

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

Hodges, Job E.

10.

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

11.

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

P. B. Medawar

12.

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

Brown, Les

13.

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

14.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

15.

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

Canetti, Elias

16.

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

Koysis, Ted

17.

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

Mann, Thomas

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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

20.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

21.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

22.

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

Anatole France

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

John Cage

26.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

27.

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

Hyman Rickover

28.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

29.

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

30.

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

Hortense Calisher

31.

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.

32.

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

Sutton, Percy

33.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

34.

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

35.

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

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

Bunche, Ralph

37.

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

Grinde, Bob

38.

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

39.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Hill, Napoleon

40.

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

Block, Henry

41.

It's a pretty good idea to be of good cheer but not all the time. Just at the most unexpected times.

42.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

47.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

48.

It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

49.

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.

50.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.