Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Howard Aiken

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

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

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

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

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

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

Chartier, Alain

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

Bachelard, Gaston

10.

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

P. B. Medawar

11.

Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride by on air. You've only to reach out and snatch one...

Mckeun, Rod

12.

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

13.

The point, simply, is that we are doing more rediscovering these days than discovering coming anew upon truths that ignorant people refused to examine, over the centuries, because the wise people who held custody of the fundamental truths of nature were unpopular.

Williamson, John

14.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

15.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

16.

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

Horton, Doug

17.

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

18.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

22.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

26.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

27.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

28.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

29.

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

30.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

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

Maritain, Jacques

32.

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

Walter Bagehot

33.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

34.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

35.

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

36.

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

Rohn, Jim

37.

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

Butler, Samuel

38.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

Gide, Andre

39.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

40.

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

Rorty, Richard

41.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

42.

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

Emile Chartier

43.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

45.

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

46.

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

Victor Hugo

47.

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

Cotvos

48.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

49.

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

50.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.