Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Horton, Doug

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Kettering, Charles F.

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

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.

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

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

John Steinbeck

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

Get your ideas on paper and study them. Do not let them go to waste!

Brown, Les

10.

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

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

P. B. Medawar

13.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

14.

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

Simpson, E. L.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

18.

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

19.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

Rohn, Jim

21.

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

22.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

23.

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Marden, Orison Swett

24.

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

25.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

26.

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

27.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

28.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

29.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

30.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

31.

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

32.

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

Avery, Milton

33.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

34.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Jim Hightower

35.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Victor Hugo

39.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

40.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

41.

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

Mason, Ken

42.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

43.

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

Maritain, Jacques

44.

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

Canetti, Elias

45.

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

Cotvos

46.

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

47.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

48.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

49.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

50.

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