Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

1.

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

Mann, Thomas

2.

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

Twain, Mark

3.

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

Williamson, Marianne

4.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

5.

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

6.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

7.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

8.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

9.

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

Bunche, Ralph

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

P. B. Medawar

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

16.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

17.

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

Koysis, Ted

18.

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

Canetti, Elias

19.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

20.

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

Emile Chartier

21.

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

Hodges, Job E.

22.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

23.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

24.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

27.

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

William O. Douglas

28.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

30.

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

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.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

33.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

34.

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

35.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

36.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

41.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

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