Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

- Hyman Rickover

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Brown, Les

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

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

Kettering, Charles F.

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

James, William

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

Howard Aiken

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Hugo, Victor

10.

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

11.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

12.

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

Anatole France

13.

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

14.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O'Keeffe

15.

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

16.

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.

Saunders, Richard

17.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

18.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

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

20.

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

Hector Berlioz

21.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

22.

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

23.

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

Walter Bagehot

24.

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

25.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

26.

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

Rostand, Jean

27.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

28.

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

Koysis, Ted

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

Carnegie, Dale

32.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

33.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

34.

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

Jim Hightower

35.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

36.

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

37.

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

38.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

39.

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

Rorty, Richard

40.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

41.

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

42.

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

Chartier, Alain

43.

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

Niblack, Griff

44.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

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