Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Hill, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Ideas

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

Berry, John

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Rostand, Jean

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

Walter Bagehot

11.

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

Mason, Ken

12.

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

Mann, Thomas

13.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

14.

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

15.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

16.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

17.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

18.

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

Canetti, Elias

19.

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

20.

Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied.

Glasgow, Arnold H.

21.

The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.

Lynch, David

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

24.

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

25.

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

Emile Chartier

26.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

27.

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

Sutton, Percy

28.

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

Niblack, Griff

29.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

32.

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

Anatole France

33.

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

34.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

35.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

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

Proust, Marcel

37.

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

Hill, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

43.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

James, William

44.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

45.

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

46.

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

Victor Hugo

47.

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

48.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

49.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane

50.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie