Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Rorty, Richard

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

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

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

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

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

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Keynes, John Maynard

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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

Proust, Marcel

13.

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

Maritain, Jacques

14.

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

Williamson, Marianne

15.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

16.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

17.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.

Avery, Milton

21.

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

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Canetti, Elias

24.

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

Block, Henry

25.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

30.

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

31.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

32.

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

Eliot, George

33.

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.

34.

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

Cotvos