Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

You have to hatch ideas -- and then hitch them.

Everson, Ray D.

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

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

Penny, A. Owen

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.

Bach, Richard

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.

Jones, Barry

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

10.

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

11.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

Rivarol, Antoine

12.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

14.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

18.

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

Butler, Samuel

19.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

20.

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

Picasso, Pablo

21.

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

22.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

23.

Man's fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.

Ernst, Morris L.

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Hill, Napoleon

27.

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

Simpson, E. L.

28.

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

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

31.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

32.

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

Cotvos

33.

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

34.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Proust, Marcel

35.

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

Hodges, Job E.

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

Emile Chartier

38.

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

39.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

41.

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

42.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

43.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Rorty, Richard

46.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

47.

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

Maritain, Jacques

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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