Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

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

Trotsky, Leon

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

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.

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

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

10.

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

Pauling, Linus

11.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

12.

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

13.

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

Block, Henry

14.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

15.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

16.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

17.

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

18.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

William O. Douglas

20.

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

21.

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

Mann, Thomas

22.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

23.

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

Canetti, Elias

24.

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

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

27.

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

John Steinbeck

28.

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

29.

You look at any giant corporation, and I mean the biggies, and they all started with a guy with an idea, doing it well.

Robbins, Irvine

30.

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

Twain, Mark

31.

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

32.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

Lewis, Wyndham

35.

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

Victor Hugo

36.

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

Rohn, Jim

37.

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

Emile Chartier

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

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

Brande, Dorothea

40.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

41.

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

P. B. Medawar

42.

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

43.

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

Maritain, Jacques

44.

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.

45.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

46.

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

Townsend, Robert

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

50.

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

Niblack, Griff